


After Alchera

by infiltraitorN7



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-08-09 15:02:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 23,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7806457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiltraitorN7/pseuds/infiltraitorN7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of short works in which Kaidan mourns Shepard after the Normandy falls over Alchera, and explores his relationship with her through Alliance-mandated therapy sessions.  Takes place after the beginning of Mass Effect 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. After the Normandy is lost over Alchera, Alenko

He had known what he would say, before he heard the door to her cabin hiss open, before he saw her bent over in the dark, datapads blinking, her leg bouncing, hammering out a code he would never get the chance to decipher. But until that moment, he would have said that if he had learned nothing else in his life, it was that words were imprecise tools for delicate jobs. Words were band-aids when the neck had snapped, knives against an infrared scope in the dark. So often he fell back on laughable clichés, because all of the words inside him refused to fit together; they were pistols missing parts, hollowed clicks instead of bullets in the air.

But that night— for once, his words hadn’t jammed in the chamber. He had said exactly what he _meant_ to say, shaping his thoughts with a sniper’s precision: one shot, one kill. He had told her that everything in the universe would come around again. The Reapers, the sun, the Alliance, death and blood and ships exploding in the sky— it would all come around again. But he and she, that wouldn’t return. There was only one moment in the universe, one point of convergence out of all possible timelines, all coordinates in space, where this chance existed, toe to toe, forehead to forehead. They’d be ungrateful fools not to open their calloused hands in reverence to accept this, time and space’s singular offering.

He had said the words, you and me, as if they were unique, as if there was only one she, and only one he, out of all the lives spilled across all the horizons, out of all lifetimes. As if her rough hand on the back of his neck was inimitable poetry, the kind that Ash would softly recite when the crew was grim, all those tense bodies ready to pop like heat sinks out of a shotgun.

Now he runs those words through his head, circles within circles, as he always does, and realizes that though he had followed procedure, gone by the book and triple-checked his calculations, he had utterly failed to see the Reaper-sized flaw in the equation; his precision-carved thoughts had been shrapnel in the barrel, and when he had pulled the trigger, the flame had caught and those words had backfired- it had just taken the Normandy’s silent descent into atmosphere for his adrenaline-numbed nerves to feel the impact, the recoil breaking his nose, eyes blinded by the fire —

He had said the words but _you_ and _me_ as if the rarity was a gift that rearranged the mundane into the precious, the irrational into the rational, as if the scarcity was reason and not absurdity, an argument for instead of against — but then he had knelt, gloved palms pressed against the evac shuttle’s window, pressed so hard that he had imagined breaking glass shattering into airless space, a geyser of glass and snowfall, enough snowfall to smother the flaming flower of the Normandy, enough snowfall to cushion a fragile body falling in space.

The sheer chance of meeting Shepard, loving Shepard and being loved by Shepard, the improbability of these two bodies occupying one point in space; the one in a million odds of an eezo accident and wind blowing in the wrong direction, the blue force of his mind, the strength under his skin — he traces the contours of his life, feels it forged like the blade of a double-edged knife, cutting both ways: each gift a curse.

He had pulled the trigger, launched the words, true as Shepard’s aim, and now he has to live in a universe where the singularity of _you_ and _me_ has already flared and burst, fallen away; there would never be another _her_ breathing softly after another mission, hands like sonnets on _his_ bent neck. Now, forehead pressed to a star-filled window, he weighs each remembered word, feels their weight settle. And he wonders how he can carry them, and all of her that remains in them, into the long years ahead.


	2. After Alchera, Kaidan Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan has a recurring dream about Shepard, and regrets

The dreams are simple; Kaidan has never been a complicated man. 

First, he looks over his shoulder, into a sun-drenched kitchen, late afternoon light golden.

She’s cutting avocados.

It’s warm, too warm, like it always is at that time of day, at that time of year. Black tiled floor, stark white walls.  Black and white, so unlike her, so like her.

It’s quiet.  He knows she listened to music wherever she went— in her earpiece, in her cabin, in the shower. He could hear it pulsing through the captain’s quarters while still in the elevator. Except when he was with her. When he was there, she would let the silence in. As if she had known that most music reverberates in his skull like a ricocheting bullet. He can’t remember telling her.

The only sounds are her slow breathing, the knife slicing through the flesh of the avocados, hushed traffic outside the window, more like waves hitting the shore than vehicles in transit.

He is surprised, every time. He looks over his shoulder, and there she is. She doesn’t look up. She never does.  

Next, he studies her profile, limned in that orange afternoon light, the kind that always made him depressed as a child, because the day was dying, and another day of summer was about to pass, bringing the inevitability of school, homework and the long dark of autumn and winter. Vancouver had such rare sunny days, it felt like a gift given and then returned, as the sun set in a cloudless sky.

Sometimes he holds whiskey, a fat low glass, heavy bottomed, condensation gathering under his warm fingers. Sometimes his hands hang loosely at his sides.

Sometimes she wears socks. Sometimes she stands barefoot, calloused feet on cool stone, and she shifts her weight like she always did, left to right, right to left.

Sometimes her hair is loose, hanging down her back. Sometimes it is gathered at her neck, tucked behind an ear, an ear he has traced with tongue and breath, so many times, not enough times— the memory of it still raw, burning as if he had placed a gloveless hand on the hot barrel of his pistol after a firefight: skin soft and fragile as a flower petal, the kind that was at her memorial— he doesn’t know what kind, because he doesn’t know the names of flowers.  It was white.  Its scent was so sweet it turned his stomach, his nausea rising as if he had been slammed in the gut with a rifle butt.

He used to send flowers to his mom, whatever looked pretty on the extranet pictures, whatever was on sale. Now he sends chocolates. Fruit baskets. Cookie bouquets.  She complains that he is making her gain weight.  She doesn’t ask why he stopped sending flowers.

In the dreams, Shepard is cutting avocados. First, he turns his head. Then, he stares. Next, because Kaidan is not a complicated man, he moves towards her.  

He takes one step, sometimes wearing socks, sometimes barefoot, sometimes armored boots, blue and polished in the late afternoon sun, but strangely soundless in the dream.  He takes another step, this time more quickly, something like panic making his limbs feel weightless, electric, his breath ragged. He moves behind her, looks down at the arch of her neck, the line of her shoulders, the bundle of hair, and he tries to hug her.

And every time, the moment his arms should circle muscle and heat, her sun-warmed back pressed against his chest, she disappears. No sound. No clatter of a knife falling from hands no longer there.  Just— air, where once was skin and blood and bone.  

On the counter, where the avocados lay, and the knife’s edge catches the sun, hurting his eyes, stands a framed photo, the one from all the media promos. Shepard saluting against a field of stars, the Alliance insignia on the breast of her dress blues.

He wakes up.  

He wakes up, and he wishes he were a more complicated man.  

He wishes he were more like Garrus— instead of doing the same damned thing every time, his breath too loud in his ears, his feet incapable of covering space and precious seconds— he could tear through the red tape, the rules of the dream, so that what happens every time, doesn’t.

_he wishes he could break the laws of gravity, of cause and effect, of entropy— instead of a body falling apart: a body knitting back together; instead of chaos in the silent sky: a perfect unshattering of steel and carbon fiber, fires extinguished, hull breach repaired—_

He wishes he were more like Liara, and could peel back the layers, an archaeologist of his own psyche, find some buried clue to changing the course of the dream’s flow.

_he wishes he could discover a Prothean artifact, some ancient technology to reverse the flow of time; he would return to the moment she barked at him to get the fuck off the ship, to abandon the Normandy, to abandon her—_

He wishes he were more like Ash, bold enough, determined enough to get across those black tiles before she vanishes.  

_he wishes he had been brash enough to not just follow her orders, but his instincts, to have overridden her will, followed her into the silent night—_

He wishes he were more like Tali, with her nimble fingers, and could hack the system, rewrite the dream’s code. 

_he wishes his fingers could sweep across the code of the universe, hack the equation that insists time must move forward and not backward, rewrite the formula decreeing that which has been done, cannot be undone—_

Or even like Wrex, so that he could simply charge into that kitchen and explode what he knows is coming with the force of Krogan willpower.

_he wishes he had head butted her right in chest, thrown her over his shoulders as she had done for him so many times, carried her into the fragile safety of the evac shuttles—_

But if wishes were horses…

If he had a credit for every wish…

He falls back on the old clichés.

He is just a man, and he is just himself— he can’t be anything other than what he is, just as what has been done, can’t be undone.

Every time, she is cutting avocados. He tries to hold her.

He wakes up.  He thinks he smells white flowers. He feels the guilt settle in his arms, instead of her body.  He stares at the ceiling and waits for the weight to lift.  During the first year, it doesn’t.


	3. After Alchera, Anderson calls a doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Javier Ishida of the SSV Perugia watches the news and receives bad news of his own.

He was sketching in the SSV Perugia’s Med Bay, pen and datapad, digital lines on an electronic field. He probably should have been sorting med supplies, labeling pills, organizing the shipment of sleep aids and antibiotics they had picked up from the latest run to Arcturus. But no one had needed him today, and the Perugia hadn’t seen any real action since the Battle of the Citadel. The sorting could wait.

He slowly sketched a cicada, perched on the rough frond of a Cyprus tree. His omni-tool emitted the low sounds of a thunderstorm in the distance, rain beginning to plunk heavily on a gravel path.

The rough growl of a Scottish voice shattered his trance, and he almost fell off his chair.

“Ishida, get your ass to the rec center,” his omni-tool barked.

“What the fuck, Donnelly, don’t you know how to knock?  You made me drop my datapad. Give a man some warning before yelling at him.”

“Knock, knock, Doc, get to the rec center,” Kenneth’s voice drawled.

“Why the hell are you pinging me? Where is the Flight Lieutenant?”

“You seem to be forgetting that you turn off the Med Bay comms when you’re feeling antisocial. Or maybe she just forgot about you.”

“What Kenneth is trying to say is that it’s important and you’re needed,” a woman’s voice cut in, exasperated.

_“Oh I need you, you fine piece of tall, handsome ass,”_ Kenneth’s voice shrilled, parodying Gabriella Daniel’s North American dialect.

“Gabby, I find it medically necessary for you to punch Engineer Donnelly in the back of the head. That’s an order.”

“Please hurry,” she answered, surprising him. It sounded like she had been crying.

“On my way.”

He picked his datapad off the floor, noticed that he had gotten the cicada’s wing proportions all wrong, and set it on his desk.

***

Every vidscreen in the Perugia’s recreation center flashed in unison: a news anchor droning emotionlessly, images alternating between the Alliance’s flagship, the Normandy, and the saluting figure of Commander Shepard, First Human Spectre and Hero of the Citadel.

The members of the Perugia’s crew who weren’t on duty stood, instead of sitting on the scattered couches and bean bag chairs. Ishida had snorted when the Alliance Morale, Welfare, and Family Division had asked his advice on renovating the fleet’s rec centers, how best to facilitate relaxation among soldiers while cooped up on starships during long missions.  _Get ‘em bean bag chairs and mini-fridges_ , he had written entirely as a joke on the recommendation report, among the more serious suggestions he had a professional duty to include. He had almost passed out laughing the first time he had stepped onto the Perugia and seen Engineers Gabby and Kenneth lounging on matching bean bags, each with a bottle of beer in hand. The rest of the crew wrote him off as an eccentric academic after that, but after Kenneth somehow managed to discover that Ishida was the one responsible for such luxury, he had personally cracked open a bottle for him and chatted him up while Gabby sat rolling her eyes. Ishida had politely held it, condensation numbing the pads of his fingers, until Gabby and Kenneth were so caught up in some engineering explanation that Ishida had a chance to quietly dump it in the trash compactor before anyone noticed he hadn’t taken a sip.

Now, no one was speaking. He could taste the collective shock in the room, making his teeth ache. He understood the theory of why people gathered together to process tragedy, as opposed to fleeing to isolation. Humans are social creatures, after all, having evolved to network, to cling together to survive, long before they ever launched themselves from Earth and began settling the stars. But he had never understood it personally. In the face of overwhelming horror, he wanted to be alone, to insulate himself from the heaving emotions of all those other bodies in the room. This event, however, was not a tragedy for him. He looked at the screens and felt nothing, save the reflected grief of the rest of the crew in the room.

His entrance must have caught Gabby’s eye, because she looked at him, and without taking her eyes from him, reached over and put her hand on Kenneth’s shoulder. Kenneth motioned for him to join them.

“What happened?” Ishida asked, more out of the knowledge that his crew mates needed to speak, and less from actually needing to know.

“She’s MIA. Presumed KIA,” Kenneth answered quietly.

“How?”

“We don’t know. The Normandy was  _destroyed_. We don’t know who did it. It would have required powerful canons to break through the Normandy’s shields, something only the Turians would have at this point.”

“Why would Palaven want to destroy the Normandy?” Ishida asked.

“They’re not saying it was Palaven— there are rumors that it was the Council, sending some Turian vessel that somehow survived the Battle of the Citadel. In retaliation for the Destiny Ascension. They’re talking about an intragalactic war,” Gabby said, eyes wide.

“Do you believe that?” Ishida asked, suppressing his urge to scoff.

Gabby thought for a moment. “No. But all sides have been on edge since we began dominating the Council. It won’t matter if it’s not true, if the human public decides the other Council races are responsible for taking down Commander Shepard.”

“Alliance brass is more in danger of being cowed by the Council itself, not the human public,” Kenneth grunted, shaking his head. “But whoever did it is keeping quiet about it. No one has claimed responsibility yet. All we know is that we’ve lost out best ship and our biggest hero.”

“Are you… actually crying?” Ishida asked, seeing Donnelly’s red-rimmed eyes.

“What kind of question is that for a shrink to ask? Of course I’m crying! Shepard saved the galaxy from gigantic space squid. We owe her our lives!” He cried, trying to sound mock-indignant and offended, but only managing to sound forced. His grief, and his tears, were real.

Ishida remained silent, unwilling to argue over what category he’d place Shepard in, if he were forced to think about it. “Hero” was not one of them.

“We thought maybe you’d have some advice, on how to deal with all these feelings,” Gabby said earnestly. “Kenneth isn’t used to feeling anything besides lust.” She continued, glaring at him.

“Mmm. My advice is to do what you have been doing; don’t isolate yourselves, and comfort each other.”

“Do you hear that, Kang? Doc says we need to comfort each other!” Kenneth called to a full-figured marine on the other side of the room.

“All right, Donnelly. Come over here,” she cracked her knuckles, “and I’ll administer a little anal fisting to take your mind off things.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Kenneth said, as he ducked behind Gabby’s petite frame.

“You’re a pig,” Gabby said, kicking back with her leg and knocking him into a bean bag.

“But after everyone has had a chance to see the news, turn the vidscreens off, or put on reruns of Blasto,” Ishida talked over them. “Staring at the images over and over again, with no new information— it can compound the negative feelings, instead of relieving them.  All right?” He spoke loudly, so the other crewmembers turned to listen as he spoke. A few nodded. A few looked at him blankly, then turned back to the screens.

“Yeah, I’ll ask the Captain to issue some orders,” Ishida said, putting a hand on Gabby’s shoulder. She covered it with her own and smiled without teeth, then turned back to Kenneth. “You need more sensitivity training,” she barked down at him.

“Kang, file a harassment report against Engineer Donnelly, if you please,” Ishida said.

Kang waved him off, and turned back to the vids.

“Come find me if you want to talk privately,” he said to the engineers, and then left the rec center, the afterimage of Shepard’s propaganda photo leaving a foul taste in his mouth.

***

No one came to him for his psychiatric expertise. Humanity had progressed light years beyond the pre-21st century stigma against acknowledging mental health issues. But the military remained the military, even into the 22nd century, despite official Alliance policy supporting the treatment and encouragement of soldiers with mental health problems. Very few active duty soldiers wanted to voluntarily reveal weakness, admit they were depressed, suffering from night terrors, or triggered into panic by the sound of a soda can popping its top. Such weakness could be fatal, as it took all their mental fortitude to come back alive, and bring their comrades with them.

As a result, and despite his specialization in psychiatric medicine, Ishida’s function within the Alliance primarily involved the physical side of medicine: stitch up the soldiers who came back wounded. Dispense the allergy meds, the hangover meds, the antibiotics and the vaccinations. Treat the STIs that some marines managed to bring back from shore leave; he was genuinely impressed with the kind of sexual shenanigans these kids could get up to these days, in just a week with access to inter-species space hubs. The galaxy was largely at peace; not until or since the gruesome assault on Torfan, and then the battle of the Citadel, had Ishida seen much action as a flight surgeon.

So he spun around in his chair in the med bay. He sketched and listened to ambient sounds from his home in Spain. He researched and wrote articles for publication in academic journals. He waited for his contract with the Alliance to be up, so he could retire from the military at 38 and live out the rest of his life in private practice, treating neurotic suburban househusbands and the behavioral disorders of the wealthy elite’s children. In any case, that’s what he tells people, when asked what the hell he’s doing in the Alliance when he clearly lacks all respect for the hierarchy or the propaganda.

He was relieved when no one seemed to need to talk about the latest human tragedy of the Normandy’s fall. He had no interest in thinking about Commander Shepard, or the carnage he had seen as her signature, carved into the places she had been, or listening to the wailing of service members who had never met her, and who certainly had never met her victims.

Naturally, because he wished for the opposite, his omni-tool lit up a few weeks after the breaking news in the rec room.

“Councilor Anderson,” he said warily as his former commanding officer’s face filled the omni-tool’s vidscreen.

“Javier, I’m so glad you decided to answer,” Anderson replied, smiling his faint, fatherly smile.

“Javier is it? All right, David, it’s been awhile. What do you want?” Ishida leaned back in his roll-y chair and spun slowly.

“You know how much I hate it when you do that, son. It makes this old man seasick when you spin while we talk.”

“I know,” he grinned. “But you know how much I hate it when you call me because you want me to do something I don’t want to do.  Fair’s fair.”

“Hmm. Fair enough. Then I’ll cut right to the chase. I need you back on Arcturus.”

“Why? I just got back out here among the stars, why would you drag me back to that floating tin can so quickly?”

“I know I promised that you’d get to see the sights, take your mind off things for the last leg of your commission. But you also know I wouldn’t ask unless I really needed you. And I do.”

“Whhhhyyyyy?” Ishida prompted.

“You want me to stroke your ego? Fine. Because you’re the best flight surgeon we have, and the case I need you on requires your special expertise in PTSD. And just between you and me, I also need you because of your… special circumstances.”  Anderson coughed.

“What do you mean?” Ishida stopped spinning. “Which special circumstances?”

“Your experience with red sand addicts.”

“You want me to treat an addict suffering from PTSD? You know how I feel—”

“He’s not an addict. But he’s been close to one for some time.”

“Who the hell is this guy, that you’re dragging me from my last tour of duty, which you promised would be a cakewalk, and calling me personally to ask nicely?”

“He’s one of the heroes of the Battle of the Citadel. One of the Normandy survivors.”

“You mean one of Shepard’s lackeys? Some cowboy who thought he was hot shit because he could follow in the shadow of a Spectre and escape any responsibility for carrying out her lunatic orders?”

“Okay, first, this guy isn’t anything like that. He’s Canadian for crying out loud. And secondly, I know you disagreed with Shepard’s actions. But she wasn’t the monster you make her out to be—”

“I  _saw_  what that butcher did to the few who survived Torfan, first hand. She didn’t have to stick around to deal with their night terrors, or their severed limbs, or their self-disgust for being ordered to leave their comrades behind,  _orders they followed_ —”

“This isn’t about Shepard. This soldier needs you, Flight Surgeon. You are uniquely equipped to help him recover from something that could damage him for life. He’s a good soldier. And a good man. The Alliance needs him with his head on straight, and he’s  _suffering_. So you can be pissed at a dead hero all you want, a woman I loved like a daughter, I’ll have you recall—” Ishida felt hot discomfort as Anderson’s voice actually broke. He listened as Anderson took a deep breath, as he looked away at some point off screen. After a few moments, he continued. “But you  _will_  come back to Arcturus, and you  _will_  uphold the oath you took in exchange for the Alliance funding your med school tuition. I hate to pull rank and guilt-trip you, son, but please, as a personal favor to me, and as a part of your obligation to your employer, come back to Arcturus and do your best to get this guy back on his feet.”

_For fuck’s sake. It’s not fair when the old man cries._

“What’s this shining paragon’s name?”

“Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko.”

Ishida contemplated his mentor’s face through the vidscreen. He looked older than the last time they had spoken.

“You really think he’s a good guy?”

“I really do.”

“You really think I have the best chance at helping him?”

“I really do.”

“You realize you’ll owe me a huge favor, right? You promised. And now you’re going back on your promise. I’ll have trust issues now. You’ve shattered my innocence, David, I’ll never—”

“I’ll send the transfer docs and Alenko’s service records asap. The Perugia will complete its current patrol, but you’ll disembark the next time they dock at Arcturus, in a few weeks,” Anderson interrupted him.

“Aye aye, Captain,” Ishida sighed.

In the silence that hung in the room after Anderson signed off, Ishida sat, slowly spinning his chair. He picked up his data pad, and called up the last sketch he had done. A pair of Cyprus trees flanking an empty country road, winding in the hills. He noticed he had gotten the perspective all wrong; the road’s angles weren’t foreshortened enough, and the trees were slightly crooked, as if forever bowed by a strong wind.

His omni-tool chirped softly, and he knew that Anderson had already sent Alenko’s records. He leaned back in his chair, and took a deep breath. He wondered idly why it was the way of the universe, that good people always loved the worst. Why kind men were left to weep in the wake of cruel children.


	4. After Alchera, Kaidan, Joker, Liara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joker's heart is broken, as well as everyone else's. Written for the tumblr meflashfanwork August Friendship Theme.

How did it happen?

The escape pods popping into the sky. As a child, he imagined space beyond earth’s atmosphere as dark. But it’s not. It’s bright, especially when drifting on the dark side of a planet. Alchera was no different; all those blinding stars, pulsing in the black.

He had pushed and pulled as many crew members as possible into the pods, doors hissing shut one by one, the propulsion knocking their heads back against the walls, the jarring, eerie silence of floating in space.  No auditory emulators, not in the pods: extra expense, extra weight.

His Alliance-appointed shrink will say that it was foolish of the Alliance, not to install them— who knew how long the survivors would be drifting in space, waiting for rescue? A person could go insane from the silence, pierced only by the panicked breath of those in the pod with him.

Kaidan knows better. Kaidan knows that a person would die from suffocation, as the oxygen ran out, long before the craziness set in. He’s a support guy, the one who helps keep his squad alive. It’s his job to know.

His shrink’s job is to pretend that band aids fix severed limbs. That talking about your broken heart sutures it back together. That machines mimicking the sounds of a ship exploding in space will prevent a mental breakdown.

How did it happen?

_“Get the fuck off my ship,” she had ordered._

And he did.

She had sent the distress signal in time. It only took three days for the Alliance cruiser to reach them, plucking them from the sky over Alchera like hawks snatching mice from a field.

Three days to press his face against the tiny porthole, to curse his human vision for being unable to see a star’s light reflecting off heavy weave armor plates, or the tiny geyser of oxygen spilling into the vacuum from a burst hose. Three days to suck in more than his fair share of oxygen as he hyperventilated, passed out, and woke again to stare out the porthole.

How did he know?

Joker, alone in the last escape pod, had transmitted the message to the rest of the survivors, and then cut communications.

_“She’s gone.”_

“They don’t need auditory emulators in escape pods, Doc,” he’ll say, months later.

“Why is that, Lieutenant?” His shrink will ask.

“The silence is already too loud.”

How did it happen?

They opened Kaidan’s pod first. Survivors stumbled out into the cruiser’s loading bay, and then stood around in small clumps. No one knew what to say. The ship’s second in command stood with a datapad, checking off the names on his list, assigning enlisted men the task of leading the survivors to their temporary quarters, until their return to Arcturus. Liara walked over to Kaidan and put her arm around his waist, leaned her head against his shoulder. It was the first time they had ever touched. She was warm, and felt so fragile compared to Shepard— delicate bones under soft skin. Garrus and Wrex stood next to them, eyeing the unfamiliar human crew. When Tali emerged from her pod, she was shaking. Garrus put a hand on her shoulder, guided her back to their little huddle.

They forced open Joker’s pod last.

A junior officer went in, then came out, alone. She shook her head.

“He won’t come out. He outranks me, I can’t order him.”

Kaidan felt his fists clench.

“Whoa, we got a biotic here,” he heard someone say.

He could feel it. The rage in the pit of his stomach, that pressure at the back of his skull; he was losing control of his biotics and he felt like letting it happen.  _Joker and his stubborn refusal to evacuate. Joker and his abnormal attachment to the Normandy. As if the Normandy was defined by her shields and thrusters, metal and fiber, and not her crew. As if the drive core was what made the Normandy special, and not its commander. As if refusing to leave would prevent the final gasp of a vessel dissolving into atmosphere, or a pair of lungs spinning in space._

He was going to tear Joker out of that escape pod, even if it broke every brittle bone in the man’s body.

He tried to take a step forward. Couldn’t. He felt himself rooted in place.  He looked down, and saw Liara’s slender arms glowing their own biotic blue.

“No.”

She held him fast, blue flickering along her soft skin.

“It’s not his fault, Kaidan,” she said.

He looked into her face, a face he had once compared to art, before Shepard’s face became a masterpiece, irreplaceable and beyond all price— and he saw the loss etched deep. Liara, who had also fallen a little in love with Shepard, while he had crash landed and burned in it. Liara, who forgave Shepard for killing her mother. Who continued to look after Shepard, even after she had broken her heart. Who had offered to send him historical novels starring swashbuckling Protheans, the Asari version of the space adventure novels he’d read as a kid.

She was looking up into his face and there were tears on her lips, slipping down her chin, and she had already forgiven Joker.

“If it hadn’t been for—”

“It’s not his fault,” she cut him off. “If it hadn’t been Joker, it would have been someone else. She wouldn’t have left anyone behind. You know that. Don’t punish him more than he’ll punish himself.” Her mouth twisted. “ _Please.”_

He felt his fists uncurl, his hands hang heavily at his sides.

She turned and looked at Garrus, who met her gaze and nodded.

“C’mon, Lieutenant. Let’s get out of here,” Garrus said. Kaidan followed him blindly, as Liara walked toward the last escape pod.

Each surviving crew member was interviewed separately, their stories cross-checked and verified, reports written, official statements drafted.

Kaidan didn’t see Joker again, after they docked at Arcturus.

_“How did it happen?”_  His shrink asks.

“Silently,” Kaidan murmurs.


	5. After Alchera, Kaidan runs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan begins the long process of grieving, and feels a bit of hostility towards his therapist

These days, Kaidan is chained to a desk.  He processes enlistment reports. It’s filler work, given to a lieutenant the higher-ups don’t know what to do with after his ascension to Savior of the Citadel status, then survivor of the Normandy’s fall; the officer who started making the brass uncomfortable when he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut after he started hearing noise that Saren was a lone lunatic, that Sovereign was a fluke.  So they sent him back to Arcturus, assigned him a shrink to “evaluate his fitness for combat duty,” and now mostly ignore him.

He types the words carefully, checks for spelling errors, proper formatting, crossing the t’s, dotting the i’s.  An archaic saying, from when people still used their hands to make letters on paper made from trees. Now, handwriting is an art, practiced on expensive Thessian vellum by calligraphers trained through apprenticeships, writing out artfully styled words for the wealthy: diplomas, declarations of lineages and weddings, death commemorations, hung on walls made of imported antique oak paneling. His hands feel like they don’t belong to him anymore; someone else’s hands, doing someone else’s work.

At the end of the workday, he stretches, knots pulling deep in his muscles, at the base of his skull, in the small of his back. He can’t decide if he likes the pain, because it reminds him he’s not dead with everything that matters, or if he hates it, because it reminds him he’s not dead with everything that matters. 

For awhile, he is still, contemplating the long skycar ride home; he dreads his apartment, tidy and hollow, the one he has been using since his reassignment after the Normandy fell. He dreads the downtime.

The light goes out as the motion sensors mistake his contemplation for lack of life.

_“Look alive, Alenko,”_ a breath at the base of his skull, someone else’s voice, from what feels like someone else’s life.

What does Kaidan do in the downtime?

He runs.

He can’t read.

There was a time when reading, her head in his lap, hair spilling across his thighs, was what he looked forward to the most when they had a moment to breathe, like a physical craving.  She’d ask him to read out loud, and he would. He knew she didn’t care what the words were, only the sound of his voice reading the words, because they dragged her thoughts from their endless circles, allowing her to finally fall sleep.

“Better than sleeping pills, Alenko,” her murmured explanation.

“Better than sleeping pills,” he’d agree.  She knew how he felt about the pills, the stimulants, the red sand.  He would read.

Now, he looks at his books, old school paper volumes, haphazardly stacked in bookshelves and in windowsills, in the bathroom, gathering dust on the floor beside the bed, where he’d accidentally knock them and leave them as he fell asleep. He can’t bring himself to tidy them.

So he runs.  

The feeling comes on all at once.  The jitters, the rush of nerves, a numbness like a wave.  He has to get out of wherever he is.  The adrenaline, the anxiety, the wave of nerveless energy carries him forward. He has to run.  He runs longer, harder than he has ever run in his life.  Running was never his thing.  It was hers. Before they shared a bed, before he’d lull her to sleep with his reading, he’d find her on one of the treadmills in the Normandy’s small, smelly gym in the middle of the night, music blasting, sweat pouring down her back, dripping onto the hand rails.

“You have to sleep,” he’d shout, startling her; her body would jerk, and her head would swivel as she gripped the sweat-slicked rails, holding herself up with her arms, feet dangling as the tread kept going at its breakneck speed.

She’d bark an order to the VI to turn off the music, and only the sound of the tread would fill the small space.

“Lieutenant, _you_ have to sleep. Go back to your quarters.”

“With all due respect ma’am, you should do the same.”

“Ash is right. That does sound like a ‘fuck you.’”

“No ma’am. It sounds the way it sounds.”

“Shut this shit down,” she’d say, and the VI, somehow able to understand her rude commands, would stop the treadmill, until the only sound was Shep’s breathing.

“All right.” She’d look at him, waiting.

“I’m not leaving until you do.”

“Uh huh.” She’d give him a two fingered salute, and the gym’s door would hiss open.

“Goodnight, Commander,” he’d say to her back.

Now, he runs.  He has no schedule.  He runs at four in the morning after he has spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, watching the headlights from passing skycars slice through the dark, lighthouses in motion. He runs at lunch when the food sitting in front of him makes him feel sick.   He runs after dinner as Arcturus’s artificial day fades into artificial night, stomach knotting over the food that never seems to go down well anymore. He is carried forward until the only reason he stops running is that time has run out; he has to return to his office to meet deadlines; he has an appointment with his shrink; it is time for him to face his empty bed so that he can function in the coming day.

The station has a large track along the length of one of its arms. Observation decks line the path, floor to ceiling, so he feels like he is running through space.  The lighting along the track is dim, because the band of the Milky Way sufficiently illuminates the path, and the Alliance saves money where it can.

He runs, thoughtlessly, in a sea of stars, but he is careful not to turn his head. He is careful not to let his eyes wander, searching for a pinprick of dark against the brilliance of the galaxy, searching for a body he imagines still floating in space.

_“Eyes forward, Lieutenant,”_ her voice whispers in the back of his skull, aching like his implant.

His psychiatrist approves of the running.

“There are worse ways to grieve,” he says. “How does running make you feel?”

Kaidan has always thought that a psychiatrist asking “How does that make you feel?” was something that only happened in the vids. But this guy, he’s for real. Long fingers steepled in front of a wide mouth, bright eyes measuring Kaidan’s responses, giving nothing away.

“It feels fine, Doc.”

“Fine?” He repeats, inviting elaboration.

“Like I’m earning all those calories I eat while not using the biotics in combat, now that I’m tied to a desk.”

“I see.”  The doctor palms the datapad with a large hand, types out some observation Kaidan will never see. “How are you sleeping?”

“Some nights more than others.”  He looks away, eyes wandering over the doc’s bookshelves. Psychology books. Medical textbooks. She had liked the nonfiction he’d read. He’d read engineering texts to her, language dry and precise, and she’d say that she absorbed it through osmosis as she drifted to sleep, with every word she was getting smarter.

“ _Lack of intelligence is not one of your problems, Shepard.”_

She’d smile, some thought crossing her mind he couldn’t read.

“I can prescribe you something for the insomnia.” His shrink’s fingers hang poised over the datapad.

“No!” He says more harshly than he intended.  “No.”  Softer on the repeat.  He shakes his head, feels a migraine building.

The doctor slowly sets the datapad on his knee.

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s the first real emotion I’ve seen you show in all of our sessions.  As much as I find your affable well-adjusted Canadian guise charming, I don’t quite buy it.”

Kaidan remains silent, looking at a point over the other man’s head.

“How do sleeping pills make you feel, Lieutenant?”

Kaidan lowers his gaze, meets his doctor’s eyes. Intense interest.  Like one of the foxes at the orchard, the one his family owned outside of Vancouver. Scenting an injured chicken, sniffing the air.  This guy’s an opportunist, just like those damned foxes, and Kaidan is irritated with himself for letting his control slip, letting the anger show.

“I know that _you_ know that you will have to keep seeing me, and thereby keep being chained to a desk, until I clear you for combat duty.  Do you like riding a desk, Lieutenant?”

“You know, I uh, I really don’t,” he snaps.

“How do sleeping pills make you feel?”

“Do you antagonize all your patients, Doc?”

“Only the ones I like.”

“Have you found, I dunno, that being difficult with all these patients that you like—does that tactic work?”  

“I never said I liked that many patients.  But I think you’re the kind of guy that once you have experienced life with difficult people, you’re incapable of going back.  Anyone else is just too simple. I’ve read your files. So I have a professional hunch that yes, being difficult will be more effective than hoping you’ll come around to letting out the poison on your own, seeing as how you’ve served under a difficult person for the past year and a half.”

“With all due respect, Doctor, you don’t know anything about the person I shared the last year of my life with.”

“When you preface it like that, that sounds like a big ‘fuck you.’”

Kaidan stands so quickly the chair falls back, and it hits the bookcase behind him, knocking a few books off the shelf.  

“That’s enough,” he says, something suddenly in his eyes, the implant at the back of his skull throbbing. He’s intensely relieved that he came to the appointment in his running gear, as his feet carry him through the labyrinthine hospital halls and into the bustling throng of Arcturus’s main drag through the government quarter, as he hails a skycar and asks to be taken to the track on the other side of the station, as a voice whispers from across space and time and sleepless nights, _“Look alive, Alenko_.”

What does Kaidan do in his downtime?

He runs. He runs, alive in what feels like someone else’s body, in someone else’s life.


	6. After Alchera, Kaidan frustrates his shrink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan has his first appointment with Dr. Ishida, and Ishida finds that he has been mistaken, again.

He is consistently amazed at the discrepancy between a thing’s name, and the thing itself. He had looked up the etymology of the name, once.  _Arcturus,_ from Greek _:_   _árktos_ for bear, and  _oûros_ for guard. When he had read the translation, he thought the word meant a guardian bear. At the time, he assumed that the Alliance had given its seat of parliament and military HQ such a melodramatic name because the station drifted at the nexus of several mass relays. A bear ready to defend its territory. A sleeping beast.

There are no bears on Arcturus, besides a few he had seen at clubs he used to frequent, back when he was stationed here. Some patriots would argue that the parliament and navy were humanity’s guardian, but Ishida is not a patriot in the classic sense of the word. The parliament is just a mass of bickering, power hungry people, and the military its swinging hammer; the station just welded metal, a bubble of oxygen in a vacuum. One he had hoped never to see again, until the Hero of the Citadel decided to get herself killed in action.

* * *

 

The only good thing that has come from all this is that his Commander Shepard trading card has spiked in value overnight. He thinks about selling it and buying himself something nice— maybe a piece of art, to hang in his office. Something to stare at while his new, unwelcome patient grunts about avenging the Butcher of Torfan and sating his testosterone-fueled rage— anger being the only appropriate way to grieve in the typical meathead’s mind.

The first Arcturus was one of the brightest stars in Earth’s sky, so the ancients had noticed it and given it a name, as humans are always compelled to do. See a thing, label it neatly, tuck it in with all the other labels, pat themselves on the back for being masters of the universe. Have a feeling, invent a word and pretend that the word is the feeling. Performative language. Until they convince themselves that the words themselves have value, as opposed to all the things the words are meant to represent.

_“I promise,”_ she had said.

_“I’ll be back in the morning. Don’t you dare try to drive right now, do you hear me? Just stay here. And you better be sober when I get back, or I promise this time I’ll kick you out. I’ll kick you back to Earth so fast your head will spin. I won’t enable you anymore. I mean it. This is the last time. Promise me,”_ he had insisted.

_“I promise.”_

_“I’ll be back in the morning.”_

_“Okay.”_

Ishida feels so tired, and resents being forced to be back here again. He resents the search for new living accommodations, because he lost his when he took bereavement leave after everything happened with Maho. He resents this soldier he has never met, for serving under a woman he has never met. He knows he’s being unreasonable, but he feels himself pulled under Arcturus's blue-saturated light, an ocean of blue, as memories like anemones flower, then wither, with every step he takes. He sees the adverts for the restaurant where they had shared their last meal. He passes the club she had been thrown out of more than once.  He wants to stretch out under the summer sun in Andalucía, that blinding white, the late afternoon orange, and wait for the thunderclouds to roll in.  _Just a little bit longer. My contract is almost over, my debt almost repaid._

He picks up the skycar Anderson promised him for the duration of his stay. He hates relying on public transport, filled wall to wall with so many bodies, the bulk of the 45,000 souls living on the station crowding in at peak commuting hours. Anderson must have pulled some strings to get him a single-person vehicle permit. He thinks that he should thank him the next time they talk, but then remembers it is the old man’s fault that he is here in the first place.

He finds a parking space on the sub-level of Arcturus’s Fairfax Hospital. The hospital itself is in the government quarter, within walking distance from the seat of parliament, surrounded by diplomat and administrative offices, law firms and tasteful restaurants. He  scans his omni-tool at the security checkpoint, and heads into the labyrinthine halls. Metal and glass, and soft neon lights.

Most of the personnel he runs into recognize him by face, if not by name. They nod, or salute when necessary. The hospital is not strictly military; there are more civilian employees and patients than soldiers. He had been assigned here as a liaison in a joint civilian-military program for psychiatric health on the station. Life crammed into a tin can floating in space presents a unique blend of mental pressures that living planetside does not, and in times of peace the Alliance military strives to make itself useful to its citizenry beyond peacekeeping and pirate-wrangling. So he previously served as a therapist for both military and diplomatic personnel, and remained on-call for emergency room shifts for the rest of Arcturus’s population. The key word is  _previously_. He is not supposed to be back here. He is supposed to be on the Perugia, breathing fresh air on every ground mission, administering minor medical aid to colonists in need. Watching stars fall over alien horizons.

Instead, he rounds a corner and collides with a slight, silver-haired woman whom he almost knocks to the floor.

“Excuse me, young man—”

“Doctor Chakwas?”

The doctor looks up into his face, and smiles broadly.

“Javi! What are you doing here?”

“Doctor Chakwas, please. Only my mother calls me Javi, and it is already too much having  _one_  of those.”

“Well she’s not here. Someone has to look after you when she can’t, while you run around in space, healing wounds and breaking hearts,” she laughs, leaning back to examine him.

Ishida bows slightly. “Of course, Doctor. I can see when I am defeated.”

“That’s a good boy,” she pats his cheek, and he sees something in her face, the thing he has been dreading since his return. A sudden recollection, a hesitation in continuing a joke, as if mirth might be offensive, and laughter inappropriate. “But, what are you doing back on Arcturus? I heard you had been granted a starship post. Is everything all right?”

“Yes. Well, no. Everything is not all right, because my transfer request  _was_  granted. But then the Normandy—”

Suddenly he feels his face grow hot, as he remembers the last time he had seen Chakwas.  Over cake in one of Fairfax’s on-call rooms as they said their goodbyes, because she had been assigned to the Normandy as Chief Medical Officer. But in the following year, between colonies ravaged by Geth and his own life by Maho, he had completely forgotten. Even as he had stood and watched the news, he had not recalled that his former colleague had also been aboard the doomed starship. In this moment, he hates himself for his thoughtlessness.

“Yes, yes, it has been a terrible year for us all, in our own ways,” she says, looking down. “I heard the news about Maho after the Battle of the Citadel. I meant to write, but—”

“And I should have written after the Normandy,” he interrupts.

“Well, perhaps it’s serendipity that we’re here now, despite both of our failures as friends. Shall we have coffee now? Or are you busy at the moment?” she asks.

“I’m afraid I have an appointment, with a new patient. Which is why I am here— but I would be happy to explain it over coffee. This week?”

“Yes, I’d like that. I’ll send you my schedule.”

Ishida nods and makes his way briskly to his new office. He stands outside, takes a breath. Lifts his omni-tool, waits for the newly-received access codes to open the door. As the door hisses open, he takes a step back, startled by the figure of a man soaked in that blue, blue light.

Black hair. Shorter than Ishida, lean muscles. Wearing Alliance casual blues. Ishida’s first thought, after mindless surprise:  _A mullet? Good God, why?_

_A disciple of the Butcher of Torfan, and terrible taste in haircuts_. Ishida’s distaste is painful to conceal.

“Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, I presume?” he asks, as mildly as he can manage.

There is a moment’s delay, and then Alenko turns his head. He had been staring at the office’s small window.

“Uh, yeah.”

_Eloquent_ , Ishida thinks sarcastically.

“And just how did you get in here, if may I ask?” he asks, irritated that the other man has ruined his opportunity to collect himself, to look around his new office, to have the advantage of welcoming his new patient from a position of ease instead of surprise.

“I, uh,” Alenko sucks in a breath, rubs the back of his neck. “I had access codes.”

“How?”

“My Commander— I mean, my former Commander.” He closes his eyes.  _Brown,_  thinks Ishida. He opens them again. “My former Commander was a Spectre. She, uh. She shared her Spectre authorization, with… with a few of her officers.” His arm drops to his side. He looks back at the window.

“Commander Shepard  _gave_ you her universal access codes to Arcturus’s government facilities?” Ishida asks, appalled.

“Yeah,” Alenko says.

He waits. Alenko says nothing. He is irritated.  _What the hell is he looking at?_  There’s nothing to see, out the window. Just Arcturus’s nondescript architecture, awash in that oppressive light.

“And you, what? You thought you should break into my office and make yourself at home?” Ishida demands. This is bad. Anderson should have known better.  _I should have known better._  His hostility is probably palpable, and that’s no way to begin therapy. It’s a conflict of interest, it’s unethical—

“No,” Alenko says quietly. “I’m sorry. I wondered if they still worked— if, you know, if they had cancelled her… if they had cancelled her access. I didn’t think it would work. I dunno. It was a bone-head thing to do. But then the door was open. And I just,” he pauses. He finally turns and looks at Ishida, and Ishida notices the dark circles under his eyes, the unfocused gaze of someone who could see but was not really looking.

“Ah. It seems that they do indeed still work. It must be nice, having that kind of power,” Ishida says, wondering even as the words leave his mouth why he is saying them.

Alenko seems to focus, and to see him for the first time.

“Power? Power to wait for the shrink I didn’t ask for  _inside_ his empty office, instead of  _outside_ it? Power to stand here uselessly, staring out a window without a view? Oh yeah. I’m  _powerful_ ,” he snorts.

“So you feel power _less_?” Ishida asks, surprised, but also pleased at the insight his response has supplied.  _He responds to aggressive language, but not defensively._ He tells himself that he might as well take this opportunity to begin probing. To get a feel for this person Anderson thinks is so worth helping heal. But now he is genuinely curious.

Alenko does not respond. His thick, black eyebrows are drawn together over his dark eyes, and his mouth is twisting, and Ishida looks at his mouth, how his lips crease in the middle, how his lower lip juts a bit past his upper, giving him a stubborn look. The set of his unshaved jaw, the tension in his shoulders— Ishida feels disgust slither up his spine, but not towards the other man. He is disgusted with himself, for letting bias interfere with his professional behavior, and for the fact that he has noticed the way Alenko’s lower lip juts, how his ridiculous hair curls slightly over the collar of his blues.

_This is exactly why I asked for reassignment. I can't even keep track of my own emotions, let alone someone else's._

“I see,” he says, surprised,  _again_ , this time by Alenko’s silence. So many people rush to answer questions. To fill silence with something, anything. Whether it’s true or not. Whether it means anything or not. “Well then, welcome to my empty office. My name is Javier Ishida. Here is my card.” He slips a delicately calligraphed business card out of his medical jumpsuit’s breast pocket and offers it to Alenko with both hands, and Alenko takes it without examining it, stuffing it into one of the cargo pockets of his wrinkled pants.

“And I already know who you are, obviously,” he continues. “Please have a seat.” He gestures to the chair in front of the desk, as he moves to sit behind it. Alenko watches him move, and sits heavily in the chair only after Ishida has seated himself.

Once again, he says nothing.

“All right. You say you didn’t ask for a psychiatrist?” Ishida asks.

Kaidan shakes his head, a small movement. But he winces. Ishida has read his files. He knows that he is a biotic and suffers from debilitating migraines. That he refuses an upgrade of his implants. He sees stubbornness written all over him, but it is not the kind he had anticipated before this morning. There is a quiet resistance to every movement Alenko makes. A control that is so strained right now that it looks painful. The bruises under his eyes, the flair of his nostrils, the set of his mouth.  As if he’s trying not to scream while having a wound stitched without anesthetic.

“You do not believe that you need therapy?” he asks.

Alenko’s eyes flick to a point behind Ishida’s head and remain there.

“I don’t really know what I need right now, Doc.”

“But you did not ask to be here.”

“Yeah… uh, no. I didn’t.”

“Did you ask to be somewhere else?”

“I asked to be assigned to another starship.”

“Why?”

“I joined the Alliance to get out there, to do some good. Shep—” he swallows, corrects himself. “The Normandy’s fall didn’t change that.”

“Do you think you are still the same, after experiencing something like that?”

“No. I know you can't... you can't take a hit like that, and be the same. But it's like biotiball, you know? You love your team, but then the court gets bombed, and your coach gets... uh, spaced. Hell, I sound like Ash,” he murmurs.

“Who?”

“Nevermind. The goals are still the same. You gotta keep throwing the ball. I'm a soldier. I knew— I mean, I knew what I signed up for.”

“What are your goals?”

“I told you. To be out there, doing some good.”

“Do you believe you were ‘doing some good,’ while serving on the Normandy?” Ishida asks, a little too sharply.

Alenko finally looks at him again, brows pinched. He looks calculating. As if he is measuring Ishida, as Ishida does the same.

“Yeah. I tried to, anyway,” he answers, looking away again. No aggression. No edged defensiveness. No  _I helped save the Citadel, I helped save the Galaxy from certain doom_. Simply,  _I tried to._

“So how are you coping with your inability to change your situation right now?” Ishida asks.

“I’m following orders. Like I always do,” he answers, but instead of proud, he sounds exhausted.

“You think it is a bad thing, to follow orders?”

An expression crosses Alenko’s face that Ishida knows well: surprise chasing pain, and then regret— if Ishida had blinked, he would have missed it, as the searing control clamps down on all expression, almost as quickly as his face can make it. But for that brief moment, Ishida sees.

“Of course not,” Alenko says, throat sounding tight. “I’m by the book. Just look at my records.”

“Your records say you helped Commander Shepard hijack the Normandy.”

“Like I said. I follow orders,” Alenko answers, enunciating each word.

“The orders of an AWOL Alliance officer, and a rogue Spectre.”

“The orders of my commanding officer, who was making the right call,” he snaps.

Ishida finally remembers to flick his datapad to life, and makes a note:  _defends Shepard_ ,  _but not himself_.

“So you are coping by following orders. What does that mean?”

“I go to work. I do the paperwork. I don’t write letters to the Council about how Sovereign was just the beginning anymore.”

“You don’t believe that Saren was solely responsible for the attack on the Citadel?” Ishida asks, intrigued despite himself.

“Yeah, no. Can’t say that I do.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been told to knock off talking about it,” Alenko says tonelessly.

“Everything said between us is private, Lieutenant. The substance of our conversations is protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. I will only report your progress analysis to your superior officers, not what you actually say,” Ishida says crisply.

“You want me to bare my soul, Doc? Maybe buy me dinner first,” Alenko says without smiling.

“I prefer my dinner partners to be slightly more communicative,” Ishida says before he can think better of it. "Say something interesting, and maybe we'll see about coffee first."

Alenko just shakes his head, glancing back at him with the corner of his mouth turned down. Not quite a frown. Not a smile.

“I will take that as a no,” Ishida says. Although he knows that his response is one of genuine irritation, he rationalizes it, because he also has a hunch. _Therapeutic strategy, get the patient to talk, that’s the only thing that matters in the beginning._  Some people respond to kindness. Others to challenges. He is self-aware enough to know that if he examines his behavior too closely, he’ll find that his belligerence is a continuation of that unsettled feeling he has had since Lieutenant Alenko turned his head, brown eyes creased, shoulders hunched. Self-disgust coils in his stomach. “So you go to work. What do you do when you are not working?”

There is a silence. Ishida stares into Alenko’s drawn face, and waits.

“I run,” he finally answers.

“You run?”

“Yeah. Jogging, you know?”

“Do you find that running helps you cope with the pain?”

“Uh, who said I was in pain?” Alenko shifts in his chair, confirming what Ishida already knows.  _He must be terrible at poker_ , he thinks.

“You didn't have to.”

Kaidan says nothing, but his mouth twists.

“I approve. In case you were wondering. Running is better than drinking. Or starting fights. Or picking up STIs in the red light quarter,” Ishida says. “Just don’t overdo it. Make sure you’re eating enough, and hydrating enough. One of the keys to maintaining mental health is taking care of your physical health too.”

Alenko doesn’t say anything. He just keeps staring behind Ishida’s head. Ishida resists the urge to look behind himself, to see if there is some piece of art on the wall that he had missed in his surprise at Alenko’s presence in his office.

“Are you listening, Lieutenant?” he asks.

“Eat. Drink enough water. Loud and clear.” He lapses into silence again.

Ishida’s omni-tool chirps. The session is over.

Alenko stands. “Thanks, Doc. See you next time.” The office’s door swooshes open, and Ishida is left in the empty space. Half of the session’s time has passed in silence.

He thinks about Acturus, in the sudden vacuum Alenko’s departure has created, as if he has taken all the air with him. He had thought that Arcturus meant  _guardian bear,_ or  _watchful bear_. But he had been wrong. The Greeks had named the star Arcturus: bear-guard. It was in a constellation they perceived as a bear, located near the bear's tail; the Greeks named it for its position, as if it was the star who guarded the bear, and not the bear who guarded... something else. The night sky? What was he thinking, when he read the translation that way? He had rearranged the meaning in his own head without hesitation, and assumed  _that_ was true, because it made sense to  _him_.

A bright star in the sky: a watchful guardian in the night. Words get mangled through translation, as hearts get mangled through living. He had been frustrated with himself, when Maho had told him he was wrong. She was always good at languages. Even when they were children, as they slipped between Japanese and Spanish like fish through water. She had always learned faster, caught on faster. He had been frustrated with himself, that he had read everything all wrong.

He is consistently amazed at the discrepancy between the name, and the thing itself. He thinks of Kaidan Alenko, and what he imagined before the man stood in front of him, drowning in blue. Blue light. Blue uniform. Blue biotics– abilities he would not have known about if he hadn’t read Alenko’s files. It suddenly occurs to him that Alenko’s stupid hairstyle is intentional: the extra length conceals the implant in the back of his head. He is not strutting around, advertising his power, the sleeping beast under his skin.

He turns the words  _Kaidan Alenko_  over in his mind, trying to fit them into something resembling a label, something to slap on his new patient so he can file him away and move on, so he can go back to sketching during sessions as predictable humans pour out their predictable feelings, so he can stare at that piece of art he’s going to buy with the proceeds from Shepard’s trading card. But there’s something wrong with his translation. The more he thinks the words  _Kaidan Alenko_ , the more complex the person beneath seems, and the more he feels like he has read everything wrong, all over again.


	7. After Alchera, Kaidan worries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan worries about Shepard's body, while neglecting his own

 

Whenever someone would point out that she was behaving recklessly, or some plan wasn’t the most meticulously plotted, or  _Shepard, what the hell, are you actually going to eat that—?_

Shepard would shrug and say,  _“Something has to kill me.”_

Something had to kill her.

Kaidan knows that something had to kill her, that everyone eventually dies. And of course he knows that she, especially, was more likely than most to— that it was unlikely she was going to die softly, in bed, old age seaming her face. The life she leads— _led_ , he corrects himself, and then, _leads_ ; _her body hasn’t been found, she could still_ —, the life they all lead, soldiers were paid to stand between citizens and bullets, between slavers and colonists, between everyone else and harm. Something was going to kill her, eventually, but that didn’t mean that  _whatever it was_ had to destroy all that remained of her.  _Where the hell was her body?_

“Have you been answering your messages?” Dr. Ishida asks.

“Uh, yeah. No. Haven’t gotten around to it.”  

Kaidan had finally managed to check the business card his shrink had given him during their first session. He had been too embarrassed to ask the guy’s name again after forgetting it, and the sessions had stacked up, and he had misplaced the card for weeks, until he found it again, crumpled in pants he had already washed.  Javier Ishida, M.D., Flight Surgeon, Psychiatric Board Certified.

“Any particular reason?”

“Been pretty busy with all this pressing paperwork they’ve got me doing, you know?”

“I see.”

Kaidan looks away from Ishida’s steady gaze.  It has taken him awhile to figure out why it bothers him so much.  His psychiatrist looks him full in the face, absorbing, as if Kaidan were the only person who matters in all the world, rarely blinking. It reminds him of her. The way she’d stare, unflinching, at whomever was in front of her, whether they were blocking her way or facilitating it. More often than not, people started to talk, eager to fill the silence her steady look left gaping in the space between them: to tell her to back off; to threaten her; to justify themselves; to beg for mercy. Kaidan stares back at his doctor, and refuses to respond.

Though she could remain still and focused when necessary, in the heat of the moment, when everything was on the line— in the downtimes, the rest of the time, she was bouncing, fidgeting. Shifting from foot to foot, tapping out an inaudible beat against her thighs, restless and needing to move. Nervous energy.  She chewed gum loudly.  Blew bubbles that popped in Joker’s ear. The pilot would ban her from the cockpit every time she did it.

_“I swear to God Shepard I will crash my baby— yes, my precious Normandy, right into that moon if you don’t get out of here. So you know I’m serious. Get. Out.”_

She’d snap her jaw shut, a predator’s grin revealing all her teeth.

_“Roger that, Flight Lieutenant.”_

The gum replaced all the other things she wanted to swallow, or snort, but couldn’t when she was on duty.

“Your assignment for this week is to check your messages. You don’t have to respond. Just check them,” Ishida says.

“My assignment?”

“Yes. Your homework, to help you on your path to recovery.”

_Recovery_.  Kaidan turns the word over in his head, like hefting a knife in his hand, measuring its weight and mettle.  What is there to recover?  As far as he knows, the body hasn’t been recovered.  How do you recover from something, when the thing itself remains uncovered, exposed out in space?  It’s still out there, crash-landed on some lonely shore, sunk deep in some ocean— or worse, drifting between stars, in the cold and the dark.

It bothers him.  Not having the body.  He worries about it.  Flesh and weight, muscle and blood, hair tangled at the base of a slender neck. Despite carrying all that heavy weaponry, she never managed to put muscle on her neck. Biceps, thighs, the cords of her tendons pressed against her skin as she slung her rifle over her shoulders, as she pulled his body from the rubble; all his weight against that skinny neck.  She had plenty of muscle.  But not her neck. He worries about it.  Had it been snapped on impact? Had the flames left anything to break?

“What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”  The doctor’s deep voice interrupts his thoughts.

“Huh? Yeah. Recovery.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“What am I, uh, supposed to recover exactly?”

“Your life.”

“You know, I didn’t know I was the one who lost it.”

“Do you call shuffling papers in some cubicle at the ass-end of Arcturus a life?”

“I know what my life is,” he snaps. He can feel his brows pinch, the set of his jaw under his cheeks. A painful, sudden yearning for calloused fingers to dig into his temples, run along his forehead, sucker punches him. He hears himself suck in a breath.

“In that case, why don’t you continue  _living_  your life, which generally includes checking your messages and maintaining social contact with family, friends, and colleagues?  Check your messages and report back to me next week regarding how it made you feel,” his shrink finishes dryly, glancing at his omni-tool and motioning for Kaidan to leave, this week’s session as fruitless as all the ones before it.

He feels the old anger rise, that bitter kid from fifteen years ago looking out through his aged-lined eyes, and suppresses a rude response. He has been having trouble, lately, being irritable. Being _angry_. He keeps the vidscreen turned off, these days. The last time a news anchor mentioned _The Butcher of Torfan,_ he almost put his fist through the screen. He tries to breathe, now. He stands.

“Sure thing, Doc.”

“Do I detect some anger there, Lieutenant?”

“Huh?”

The other man gestures, and he looks down. He sees the blue of his biotics licking along his forearms, feels the pressure at the back of his skull, and realizes the biotics have flared without him knowing.

“I like the blue eyes. Very intimidating,” Ishida says, looking back at his omni-tool. “You’re moving through the stages of grief nicely. See you next week.”

* * *

Instead of listening to his messages, he runs. He never wears headphones; he rarely listens to the music he can stand when he is in the quiet of his own apartment, and the competing noises of music and Arcturus’s echoing public areas are too overwhelming for him to listen to music while he runs. He misses the low hum of the Normandy’s electronics, the steady drone of the drive core down in Engineering, the rustle of sheets in Shepard’s cabin. He has loved his life among the stars, ever since he chose it for himself, long after it had been forced on him as a teenager. But he still misses the sounds of Earth. Vancouver rain against his window. Mud squelching under booted feet. Waves against the shore. The soft thud of apples falling from trees in summer.

Arcturus is too loud. His apartment is too quiet.

As he runs, he worries about the body. He hasn’t attended many funerals in his life; his service until joining the Normandy had been largely free of combat resulting in casualties. They had patrolled Alliance-controlled sectors, skirmished with pirates and slavers, but Jenkins was the first comrade in arms that he had witnessed killed in action, and the first whose memorial he had attended. He hadn’t gotten an invite to Vyrnnus’s, obviously. He didn’t even know if Turians had funerals. 

Jenkins’s funeral was held on Eden Prime, his home. It took place in the small military cemetery the Alliance maintained for the colonists who enlisted. After the Geth attacked, the funeral home the Alliance contracted for memorials had its hands full. Services were held every thirty minutes, on the dot. The mourners stood under a small outdoor shelter as Taps played, the trumpet sounding thin and lonely in the open air. The crowd shifted uncomfortably as two young rookies, clearly unused to their role as honor guard, hesitated while unfolding and refolding the Alliance flag, the one given to Jenkins’s mom and dad in lieu of a body. The small gathering listened as an Alliance chaplain spoke about duty and honor, about peace and rest after a fight well-fought.

Ash shook her head. “How can someone say so many words but not actually say anything at all?” she asked, voice thick.

“An Alliance-regulation secular service not to your taste, Williams?” Shepard asked.

“The least he could do is read some poetry. Jenkins sacrificed his life to serve this world, he deserves more than platitudes,” she growled.

Kaidan wondered why Ash was so affected by Jenkins’s death, despite not having known him, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Why does it bother you so much?” Shepard stared steadily at Ash, curiosity more than accusation in her voice. “You never met him.”

“He was a marine, and this was his home.  I  _could_  have died here, but he  _did_  die here. That could have been me. No one deserved to die because of those flashlight-headed bastards. Even guys I didn’t know, Ma’am.”

Shepard nodded and looked away, over the rows of matching tombstones.

“I’ll make sure they read poetry at your funeral, if I’m still around for it,” Shepard promised.

“At the rate you’re going, Commander, I doubt it,” Ash murmured.

Ash had been wrong. And Shepard had kept her promise.

Now, thinking about Vyrnnus, Jenkins, Ash, Shepard— Kaidan slows his gait, stops.  Sweat drips, pools in the small of his back.  His knees are suddenly cold and he’s dizzy; he bends over, overwhelmed by the list of names.

He could drown here, and he knows it. There is enough shit in the years trailing behind him that he could choke on it, if he let himself. He could stand here, in an oxygen-filled oasis in the desert of space, and suffocate. And part of him feels that he would deserve it. Choke on these— the burden of your biotics, your mistakes, your blind obedience, her hands on your chest, her thighs wrapped around your waist, her hair in your mouth— and where the hell is that hair now, anyway? It used to get  _everywhere_. He’d find it in his clothes after spending the night in her cabin. He’d find it between the pages of his books. He’d find it stuck in the clips of his boots. All that damned hair, and now, where has it gone, when he needs it the most? He’d give  _anything_  for a lock of it, a few strands even,  _something_  to hold between his palms, to cup like the insects she’d collect while on missions to newly-charted planets.

“Don’t you ever worry that they’ll be poisonous?”

“That’s what armor’s for, Alenko.”

“Even armor can’t protect against, I dunno, acid. And your heavy armor doesn’t cover every part of you, there are the joints where the plating doesn’t—”

“Something has to kill me. Might as well be something interesting,” she’d cut him off, but gently, with that smile he still hadn’t learned to read, the one that he had never seen her make for anyone else.

He looked dubiously at whatever her new find was, feeling anxious until the thing was pinned to a cushion under glass, hopefully dead.

“That’s pretty barbaric, Commander,” Ash commented.

“We kill people for a living, and you’re giving me grief about bugs with no nervous systems?”

“Just sayin’. These little guys could be endangered or something.”

“Gunnery Chief Williams is right, Commander, you can’t be sure that the specimens you collect are safe for storage on the ship, or if their populations possess sufficient numbers to—” Liara began, only to be interrupted by Wrex.

“This one looks murderous, Shepard. Can I eat it?”

“Bad idea, buddy. I watched it inject a toxin into some reptilian critter and that thing was dead within seconds. I’m pretty sure it would kill you if you ate it.”

“That sounds like a challenge,” Wrex grinned.

“Oh yes, what a great idea, let’s test the Krogan stomach’s resistance to mystery bugs while we’re all sharing the same bathroom,” Garrus said.

Tali always stood far, far away when Shepard brought new specimens onto the ship.

“Allergies,” she’d say, shaking her head.

Kaidan can’t control the memories. Other runners pass, stirring the air around him. He is an anti-aircraft turret fixed to the ground, with no ammo, incapable of knocking the missiles of the past out of the sky. He is a tank with no fuel, and he wouldn’t be able to remember which gear was necessary to move forward even if he had any. He is shaking. Bodies in motion blur past, and he remains, bent over himself, dizzy, knees hurting, sweating and cold, until he feels a wide hand on his back.

“Lieutenant,” Ishida says.

Kaidan turns his head, and meets his doctor’s eyes.

“Take my hand.”

He looks blankly at the offered palm.

“I have an ethical duty to aid a patient in an emergency. Will you please, for once, be docile and just do as I ask?”

“How is this an emergency?” Kaidan hears himself ask.

“You are exhibiting symptoms of hypoglycemia, probably because of over-exercising and under-eating. You look like you’re about to pass out, and honestly if it’s not an emergency for you, it will be for someone else when they trip over you in this damned dim light that our penny-pinching government provides in our workout spaces.”  Ishida flexes his hand again, raises his eyebrows, an impatient expression on his face.

He reaches up and puts his hand in Ishida’s, who lifts him easily. As if Kaidan isn’t a tank weighing tons, or steel turret bolted to the ground.  He pulls him up as if he is used to the weight, and it costs him nothing. As if he could carry a lot more than what Kaidan weighs these days. He’s taller than Kaidan had realized- he has to look up to see his face. He throws a jacket over Kaidan’s shoulders, waits for a clump of runners to pass, and pulls him from the track.

They walk slowly through the crowds, past blinking neon signs, winking adverts, health-conscious restaurants, organic markets, athletic apparel stores. This is the fit arm of Arcturus, where soldiers and the bored spouses of military commanders come to work out, to be seen working out, to shed the excess energy that living in a space station inevitably builds up in an active person, until they’re ready to burst.

He hasn’t even noticed. He had remembered the track from his training days on Arcturus, found it again, and he had run. Now, he looks around and feels queasy. Ishida leads him to a parking level, punches a code into his omni-tool, and a skycar’s lights ignite.

“What’s your address?”

Kaidan tells him, suddenly too tired to protest, suddenly glad of another body next to his, warm and solid, after months of hardly speaking to anyone, of feeling like a ship adrift in space, drive core dark, long abandoned by its crew.

Ishida turns off the music that had been playing when he started the vehicle. Kaidan looks at him, but he stares straight ahead. He is silent on the ride to Kaidan’s place. The only noise is their breathing. He is suddenly aware that his sweat has soaked through his clothes into the seat, and that he stinks. He leans his head back and closes his eyes.

“ _Something has to kill me.”_

_“That may be true, but do you have to help it?”_

_“I won’t run from it.”_

_“But do you have to run_ to _it?”_

_“All right, Alenko. You’ve got something on your mind. Let’s hear it. Why does me saying that bother you so much?”_

_“Because I thought you had died, on the Citadel.”_

_She was quiet._

_“Shepard.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“I thought you had died, and I couldn’t bear it. I found out that I can’t carry that. It bothers me when you say that, because of how easy you say it. How easy you find it. But it isn’t easy for me. The thought of losing you—_ ”

_“It’s our job. Our job is to be ready, all the time.”_

_“That doesn’t mean you have to act like you enjoy it, or to— to act as if your life is something easy to lose.”_

_She looked away._

_“Why is it so easy to lose for you?”_

“Is this you?”

Kaidan opens his eyes. He sees his apartment block.

“Yeah.”

Ishida keeps staring straight ahead.

Kaidan waits. He starts to feel uncomfortable.

“No lecture, Doc?”

Ishida looks up, follows the traffic with his eyes.

“What do you want me to say, Lieutenant?”

“I dunno. I just expected you to rake me over the coals, or something.”

“What can I say that you don’t already know? You’re not an idiot, or a child. You know you should be eating. You know you should take it easier with the working out. You know you’re going to have to talk to me in order to get cleared for active duty again. You know I’m not going to rubber stamp your clearance.”

Kaidan doesn’t respond. Ishida rubs his forehead, pinches the bridge of his nose.

“So we’ll keep doing this.  You can keep stonewalling me, you can keep being angry at me because there’s no one else for you to be angry at right now, because you lost your crew and your ship and your commander. We’ll keep doing this, until one day you’re too tired, and you can’t hold it in anymore, and I ask the right question at the right time, and all that shit you have built up, that I can see in there— it’s going to come spilling out, and it’s going to be messy, and it’s going to stink worse than you smell right now, because you’re just festering. But if you think you’re going to get me to clear you just so I don’t have to put up with your sweaty ass on my upholstery, you’re wrong. If I see you on the street again, shaking like a leaf and losing your shit, I’ll be pissed but I’m not going anywhere. So get the hell out of my car, and hopefully I won’t have to see you until next week.”

Kaidan stares at Ishida, who has turned and is glaring at him.

Ishida’s eyes look really, really dark. Kaidan wonders if it’s just that the light is dim, so Ishida’s pupils are dilated, or if they really are so brown that they look black. Kaidan has that same feeling, the one he has had since their first session: that Ishida is absorbing him, like a black hole absorbs matter, and nothing about Kaidan escapes him. Suddenly, a skycar’s headlights cut through the windshield, and he sees that his eyes aren’t dark at all, but actually green. Really, really green.

Kaidan makes a sound that might have been a laugh, but catches in his throat so that he coughs.

“Seriously? Well at least I now know your face is capable of making a facsimile of a smile. Although it looks like your mouth is fighting with itself.”

“Does it? Huh. Thanks for, uh— thanks for the lift.”

Kaidan gets out of the car, and waits until he realizes that Ishida won’t pull away until he’s gone into his building. He turns, and makes his way slowly to the entryway.

A few minutes later, he stands in his dark living room, staring down at his omni-tool. The message tab is lit up, has been for months.

_Something has to kill me._

_Why is it so easy, to let your life go?_

_“It’s not much of a life, if you’re too afraid to live it. What’s the point, day after day, year after year, if all you do is cower, and worry about whether the next grenade has your name on it? What’s the point of getting old and not being able to do the things you love to do?  I’ve already lived enough lifetimes for one person.  What more is there?”_ Her head was on his shoulder. She was tracing some pattern with her finger along his chest, through his shirt. Circles. Maybe letters. She’d trace, then smooth the fabric.  

_“You think you’ve lived enough already? You think there’s nothing left, just because you survived when your family died, just because you became a famous hero? You don’t think there’s anything else to live for?”_ His voice sounded harsher than he meant it to be.

_“Well, the Reapers are still a threat.  But I’m just one person. Someone else can fight them, even if something takes me out.”_

He pulled back, staring at her, annoyed and hurt.

_“You’re not stupid, Shepard. You know what I mean.”_

_“What do you want me to say? That I don’t want to die because you’re in my life now? That I’ll be careful and cautious, and that we’ll always be together? Cause I won’t say that. I can’t say that. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. We don’t know whose name is on the next grenade. You know what I think about promises.”_

_“I’m not asking you for promises. I’m just… I just hate seeing you throw yourself into danger, avoidable danger. You’re not alone now. It will matter, if something happens to you. It has always mattered.”_

She was quiet, fingers still. He heard the ever-present thrum of the ship’s drive core, the constant humming of electronics.

_“I don’t even want to live my own life most of the time. How stingy, to be unwilling to give it up for someone who actually wants to live theirs,”_ she whispered.

He tightened his arms around her, so hard that he knew it was difficult for her to breathe. He hoped that maybe if he held her tightly enough, she’d finally get the message. That it wasn’t selfish, to keep going. That it wasn’t a fault, to have survived. That being imperfect wasn’t a crime against those who didn’t make it, just as it wasn’t a crime against those who loved her. 

He knew that his message hadn’t been received. He knew it as she settled her helmet on her head, as he hesitated. He knew it as she yelled at him to get off the ship, as he watched her stagger into the flames. As he turned and let her go. As he watched her falling, into the dark. 

He looks at the softly blinking light of his messages.  _Not today._  He can’t, today. It still hurts too much, today. His palms still ache for her hair, some piece of her to hold and to cry against.

He had been angry with Shepard for not valuing her own life, after everything she had been through. And now look at him— here he is, a shaking wreck, a foul taste in his mouth, after everything he has been through.

He’ll check his messages. But not today.

He lies down. He wonders about her body, her skinny neck— and the tears come, although he doesn’t feel any different from one moment to the next. Why cry at this moment, and not earlier? He worries about her, alone out there, in the cold and the dark. 

He falls asleep that way, alone, in the dark.


	8. After Alchera, Kaidan remembers home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Sovereign was defeated, Kaidan took Shepard to Vancouver

 

Where did they go? 

After the cherry blossom petals had fallen over a body no longer there. After the fires were smothered along a lone Reaper’s arm. After the new council was formed, and Anderson stayed behind.

Home.

They say you can’t go home again. He learned they were right, whoever _they_ were, the first time. Although everything was the same, he was not.

The second time, he learned to accept it. He no longer sought the old feelings, as rain fell softly on his shoulders. He didn’t look up old friends, from before brain camp. He didn’t expect the neighborhood arcade to be as exciting as it was before the Alliance, as he shot down pixel enemies with plastic pistols. He didn’t hope the sight of his old school would evoke feelings of camaraderie, or comfort. He appreciated Vancouver for what it was, now: the grey. The apples in the grass. The deserted shoreline. Breaths of fresh air after months of breathing the stale stuff on starships. The scent of his mom’s hair as he hugged her: perfume and dirt, class and gardening. He didn’t blame it anymore, for the changes carved under his skin, the second time. Maybe it wasn’t the place he remembered, anymore, but it was the closest thing he had to home. 

“Since we have some time now, how about you and me go home for part of our shore leave?”

“Home?”

“Yeah. Vancouver.”

“I’ve never been to Vancouver.”

“That’s all right. I’ll show you.”

He knew she didn’t feel “at home” anywhere. She had only spoken of Mindoir once in all their time together. He knew that before Mindoir, her family was from some midwestern American state, which evoked images of endless prairie and dust when he tried to imagine it. He wanted to show her Vancouver, with the unspoken offer: _You can have what’s mine, if you want. I’m willing to share._

The last time he saw Vancouver, he learned that even though you can’t go home again, maybe you can build a new one in its place.

Watching her walk along the sand. She carried her shoes, dangled from two fingers. He thought at that moment, _I will remember this_. _When we are older together, and tired together, I will remember her, here, the way her hair falls out of its braid. The turn of her wrist as she swings those shoes. The ease of her shoulders, after seeing them tense for over a year_. She looked saturated against the grey— gold, and a bright red coat. Color against monochrome.

Watching her talk with his mom. She hung back, in the kitchen. She didn’t offer to help cook. Her tilted head, her measuring silence. She answered his mom’s questions, softly. He knew it would take her a long time, to smile at his mom the way she smiled at her crew. It would take a long time for her to crack rude jokes, to fidget and whine for a snack, the way she did with him. But he knew, with enough time, she’d get there. His mom was cooler than he was; Shepard would see that, with enough time. That his mom was safe for her too.

Watching his mom take Shepard’s hand in both of hers, as they spoke softly of Ash. As she thanked her for saving her son, as she put her palm against Shepard’s cheek because she ran out of words to say _I’m sorry but thank you, I’m sorry this decision was yours, but thank you, I’m sorry for Ash’s family, but thank you_. He thought at that moment, _I will remember this. I will remember this, when the guilt comes, a poison that's never quite flushed, as we stand in front of Ash’s memorial and press our hands against the marble. As Shepard runs rough fingertips over the engraved letters and rests her head against the stone_. He promised himself that he would remember every moment: every good thing, every bad thing.

Watching her walk ahead through the apple trees, boots squelching in the mud. She had to touch everything. She ran ungloved palms along tree bark, ungloved thumbs across waxy leaves. Her head tilted back, watching weak sunlight spill through the branches, or a jet high in the sky, contrail cutting across the clouds. He had never seen her so calm. As if she were made to move in biting autumn air; as if she were made for quiet. He wondered who she would have been, if her parents had made different decisions. If she had never tried red sand. If she had never severed Batarian throats, or gutted Batarian bellies like fish, vaulting over injured comrades to keep carving her path of rage across Torfan. If she had never done all the things that earned her the title of _Butcher_.He wondered who she would have been, if she had never learned that satisfying the thirst for blood could substitute the thirst for _home_.

He tried to hold the two images in his mind at once: Shepard, gently breaking off an apple, stem from tree, and inhaling gently, skin against skin, and Shepard, snapping a surrended Batarian’s arm as she pushed him to his knees, Shepard slicing  _mindoir_ into his skin, omni-blade sunk into muscle. He tried to hold the two images in his mind at once, but all he saw was Shepard.

At that moment, she turned and held out the fruit, offering him the first bite. He shook his head, and watched her teeth sink into its flesh. 

He thought at that moment,  _I will remember this. When she breaks again, and I find her on the bathroom floor, curled in on herself and stinking of vomit, as I hold her sweaty hair back, as she shakes and shakes, and tries to push me away, I will remember this_. _Her smile, as she looks back. The taste of apples on her sticky lips as I pull her to me and kiss her as she’s still chewing, as she offers me a bite again._ No blood, or fire, or burning flesh. Just apples, and her breathing slowly, puffs of mist in the air.

Watching her stretch like a cat on his childhood bed, the long lines of her body, as he ran his rough hands down the line of her abdomen, thumb resting in her navel, as he traced star maps with his tongue along her skin, as she made soft noises in the dark, as rain hit the windows, and he moved in her, slowly, firmly—he hoped that with each movement of their bodies she could hear him say, Y _ou’re safe with me— you’re home, if you want it_.

“So what do you think?”

“About what, Superman?”

“About Vancouver?”

Fog hung over the hills rolling away from the Alenkos’ country house, perched above the orchard. They stood on the deck, the scent of damp wood rising from the rain slicked wooden planks. The distant bleats of sheep drifted through the humid air. His mom always had a soft spot for animals. Goats, sheep, llamas. Muddy hoof prints trailing through the rows of fruit trees.

Shepard took a pull from her lager, and Kaidan watched one drop of condensation fall, sliding along her lip, down the long line of her exposed throat. _I will remember this, when we’re somewhere hot. When we are both thirsty, and tired, and her throat is inaccessible, tucked safely in heavy weave armor._

“It’s wet,” she said, turning to him, leaning an arm against the deck’s wooden railing.

“I didn’t know you were a poet, Shepard,” he said, feigning shock.

“You don’t know the half of it. Here: I’ll compost—” she stopped, and her eyes flicked to his face, to see if he had heard her mistake.

“You’ll _compost_ something for me right now? You _do_ fit right in to Vancouver,” he laughed.

“And I didn’t know you were a comedian,” she said, and cleared her throat. “ _Ahem_. I will _compose_ a haiku for you, right here and now.” She held the bottle of beer in front of her, in the space between them.

_“Oh tasty lager/just a few sips from your depths/And I feel Canuck.”_

She bowed deeply, efficiently, hair whispering across the deck.

Kaidan knew her well enough to know that she didn’t do small talk. She didn’t waste words. But she did say what she meant, even if it took a while for him to figure it out.

“Let me dust off my literary criticism skills. This masterpiece calls for some serious reflection,” he said, closing the gap between them. She kept holding the beer in front of her, so that he couldn’t put his arms around her. _A test, then_ , he thought. If he got it right, or wrong, she’d let him know.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that you like it here.”

She tilted her head, one corner of her mouth pulled up.

“And I think,” he continued, “that you’re feeling like it wouldn’t be so bad, to be a Canadian.”

“I’ll never be a Canadian. I’ll never acknowledge your bacon as the One True Bacon,” she said, taking a step back.

“All right. Then—maybe you’re thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to _live_ in Canada, what with our excellent beer to make up for what we lack in bacon,” he said, taking a step forward.

“Maybe,” she said.

“And all it took was a few sips, or should I say— days, to see that maybe…this could be home, someday,” he said.

She let her hand holding the beer fall to her side, the bottle’s neck wrapped in her fist.

He took another step forward. She looked down.

Watching her hair slide down her shoulders, the beer bottle dripping condensation onto the deck, the scent of apples and mud and wet animal in the air, the creaking of fruit tree branches in the fog. He thought, _I’ll remember this, when we are careening through the stars, when she is away on a mission, far from the safety of the Normandy’s hull, far from the safety of my arms, when home feels like another life, or something I read in a book somewhere. I’ll remember her telling me she wants to come home with me someday, and I’ll remember that it’s all real. And that it’s waiting for us, when we can finally rest. After we’ve done some good._

He finally slid his arms around her, and she leaned her forehead against his, arms limp at her sides. They stood like that, for a long time. Until she shivered, and pulled back. Until she moved ahead, into the house, to put on another sweater.

Later, the memories, every recorded moment, will return and hurt him in ways he hadn’t counted on, as he watched her going ahead, as she always did. Because unlike Shepard, Kaidan keeps all of his promises.

He will remember her red coat, when he sees a flash of red and gold through the crowd, and his heart turns over strangely in his chest— the elongated moment as a woman turns, Einstein’s relativity rendering the moment endless— but when he sees her profile, it’s not _her_.

He will remember his mom thanking Shepard for saving _him_ , as he turns and walks away, as his head jerks to the side in the momentum of an escape pod thrusting into space, as he fails to save _her_.

He will remember the taste of apples, as he walks by a fruit stand, and the scent wafts, and he feels like he’s going to be sick.

He will remember condensation dripping from her lip, as he sits at a shitty bar on Arcturus, but not the one where he saw her for the first time— never that one— and orders another whiskey instead of lager, the one night he lets himself get shit-faced drunk after everything goes down.

He will remember thinking _when she is far from the safety of my arms, I will remember her telling me that she wants to come home with me someday, and I’ll remember that it’s all real,_ as he jerks awake at night, wishing desperately that it wasn’t real, as he realizes that his belief that his arms were safe was all wrong, because really it was the other way around all along: _he_ had been safe in _her_ arms, and home hadn’t been in Vancouver for a very long time, along shorelines or among apple trees; home was wrapped in red sleeves, soft noises in the dark, lips sticky with fruit, a poem offered from a quirked mouth, a sniper’s scope glinting in the dark, gloved hands smearing blood across her brow as she wipes the sweat from her eyes, barked orders in the flames, and a body falling in the black.

As he realizes for a final time, that you can’t go home again.

Where did they go, after Saren put a pistol to his own head, after Sovereign fell, after the galaxy was safe, if only for a little while?

Home, if only for a little while.


	9. After Alchera, Kaidan Contemplates Cats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan has a nice breakdown

The cruelest part of Kaidan’s present is a span of moments suspended between sleeping and waking, a liminal space; where the dream has vanished, but the grenade of reality hasn’t yet exploded at his feet—the pin has been pulled, but the fuse hasn’t yet ignited the detonator.

It’s a moment untethered from the laws of physics— a sort of quantum state, Schrödinger’s cat stretching in a box filled with poison gas, but the cat isn’t worried. A space where neon lights shuddering through his narrow bedroom window could be the aurora borealis on some distant planet, where Shepard could be stretching on the bed next to him.

In these precious seconds, he has forgotten everything that has happened, and everything that will never happen again.

It makes the waking that much worse.

When the fuse ignites the detonator, Kaidan wakes up, and the neon lights are just neon lights, flickering in the dim artificial light of a space station drifting in the dark.

This morning he wakes up, the soft tones of his omni-tool telling him it’s time to get up, to take a shower, to eat something, to zip up his jumpsuit, to lace his boots. All the mechanical, simple motions of a day gaining traction, that weigh him down like 75-kilo survival pack.

He doesn’t have any meetings this morning. Most of his reports have been filed in advance, queued to be sent to their respective destinations without him having to do anything.

He thinks about Ishida’s jacket slung over his shoulders, and remembers his homework.

He asks himself if today is a good day for it. If today is the day he can check his messages, after months of just letting a junior officer filter the people trying to contact him and only forwarding calls related to work. His pulse picks up as he thinks about it, a deep dread making his heart clench in something like panic in his chest, all those unknown messages blinking in the morning light.

There is only so much he can carry at a time. He learned that, after Vyrnnus. That he has limits, and that he has to be careful about his limits, or else everything would go spinning out of control. But if he respects his own limitations—if he listens to the warning shots his pounding head or pounding heart are firing, he can pull back, gain cover, and maintain control.

He listens to his heart this morning. It’s thrashing against his ribs as he stares at his omni-tool.

He decides cover is still best, just for this morning. He’ll shower, he’ll go to work. He’ll get something healthy to eat at lunch. And when he returns home to his empty apartment tonight, he’ll check them.

***

He spends all day dreading it. He wants to run. Badly. He wants to skip the dinner-for-one organic mystery vegetable dinner pack he has picked up on his way home, lace up his running shoes, and run until he’s nearly blind with exhaustion, so his eyes can’t see what’s in front of him.

But he remembers Ishida’s low voice, irritated but controlled, leading him through a swirling crowd of lights and people and noise— _I’m not going anywhere. You’re not an idiot, or a child. Let the poison out._

Kaidan knows all about poison. He knows all about what happens when a body begins to hemorrhage rage and regret.

Still. He has no idea what’s waiting for him in those messages, and he is terrified.

His hands, as if they belong to someone else, begin typing. The omni-tool’s vidscreen shows a spinning circle, endlessly looping. Finally the call ends with no answer, a polite message reading “contact unavailable.” Liara, wherever she is, isn’t responding. He is relieved and devastated, all at once. Her face was the only one he thinks he could handle seeing... the only living one. He thumbs his contact list, sees _Ashley Williams_. He has never removed her from his list. He calls the number, and the same thing happens.

_“C’mon LT. You know better than that,”_  Ash’s voice says in the dark. “ _You’ve always been good at making the right call. You know which one you need to make now.”_

He knows it’s not her voice.

He knows she’s dead, along with Jenkins, and—

She’s dead with Jenkins and all the rest.

He knows it’s just in his head.

But she had always believed in something more. She would look into the deep, glittering void, and she’d see it bursting with significance, and comfort. Who was he to say that she wasn’t out there somewhere, whispering to him from a place of greater safety, from a place that was soft, and warm, that she had trusted was waiting for them all.

He thumbs his contact list again, and he hears the tones of a call being made. Ishida’s face fills the vidscreen.

“Lieutenant?” His habitually wry voice sounds genuinely surprised.

“I, uh. You know what? Never mind—”

“Don’t hang up.”

Kaidan wonders why they still use the phrase “to hang up.”  When telecommunications have been advanced beyond a receiver hanging on a wall for centuries.

“Lieutenant Alenko?”

“Yeah.” He shakes his head.

“How are you feeling?”

Kaidan laughs, and it tastes bitter.

“I swear every time you do that, I think that you’re choking,” Ishida says.

“Sorry, Doc. You’ve been stuck with a real stinker of a patient.”

“The stinking part’s right.”

Kaidan looks down, and suddenly feels like crying.

“Huh. I don’t know why I—”

“Have you checked your messages yet?” Ishida asks.

“Yeah, no.” He sucks in a breath. “I’m actually really scared to.”

“Okay. What are you afraid of?”

“I dunno. Just, when I think about it, my heart starts to hurt.”

“Okay. That’s okay.”

“I know I have to. I know why you want me to. I just— I don’t think I can—” He’s terrified that now he has started talking, he won’t be able to quit. His nose has already started to run, and he looks up, hoping that maybe he can exploit gravity, let it pull the tears back into his eyes, so they don’t fall down his face.

“All right, Kaidan. It’s all right. Breathe. It’s okay to cry.”

“ _Breathe. Just breathe, Alenko. I got you. You’re safe. The nuke detonated, we did it.  Mission accomplished. Just breathe.”_

“Just let the pain come. The only way you’re going to get through this, is to let it happen. The harder you fight, the harder you’ll fall in the end. Just surrender,” Ishida is saying in the present, as layers of the past echo, blend.

He casts around for some sort of tissue, then wipes his nose on his sleeve like a little kid. Everything _hurts_. People keep telling him to breathe, but when the hell did breathing become so painful? He is furious that people keep telling him to do things that hurt him.

_“Get the fuck off my ship, Kaidan. That’s an order.”_

_“Check your messages, Kaidan.”_

_“Just breathe, Kaidan.”_

He wishes Ash were here with him.  She’d say something a bit condescending, scoff a little at his weakness, all the while fixing him a drink, coming to sit next to him, putting her hand on his shoulder. He wishes Garrus were here, to rib him about being so by-the-book: _I bet you bench-press the military legal code, don’t you, Alenko? That how you got those impressive human muscles? They’re impressive, right?  You look bigger than human women, anyway._ He wishes Wrex were here: _What the hell is coming out of your eyeballs, Alenko? Do you leak whiskey? Do the females find that attractive?_ He wishes Tali were here.  She’d pat him awkwardly on the back, ask him about the latest joint Quarian-Turian produced soap opera they were both watching in their downtime. He wishes Liara were here. She’d silently put her arms around him, and she would cry with him.

Above all, he wishes _she_ were here.

_“Just breathe, lieutenant. That’s the hard part sometimes, isn’t it?  To just keep breathing? Come here.”_

He realizes Ishida has been quiet as he drifted, as he held himself and rocked back and forth and swallowed sobs, here on the floor. But he hasn’t ended the call. Kaidan looks up, sees that the background behind his doctor has changed on screen. Hears his apartment’s buzzer.

“If you would be so kind,” Ishida says, glaring into the apartment’s vidcam.

Kaidan drags himself from the floor, and buzzes him in. They stand facing each other in the entryway, and Kaidan has no idea what to do. Ishida removes his shoes.

“Do you have anything to drink?” he asks.

Kaidan nods. “Under the sink.”

“Go sit down.”

Kaidan nods, and sits heavily on the faux-leather couch that came with the furnished apartment. Not his preference. He prefers discreet quality, and a material that doesn’t make his ass sweat. He shakes his head.

Ishida pulls the bottle of whiskey from under the sink, opens a few cabinet doors until he finds a heavy bottomed glass, and pours.

He walks over to Kaidan, who sits on the couch, hands lying limp at his sides. He hands him the glass. He watches as Kaidan takes a sip.

“You can— I mean, are you gonna make me drink alone?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Ah.”

Kaidan feels the warmth spread through his chest, feels his heart rate begin to slow.

Ishida hands him a box of tissues.

“You might want to buy a bunch of these.”

Kaidan grunts, wipes his nose.

“It’s okay to cry.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“So go ahead and cry. The messages can wait.”

But Kaidan doesn’t feel the need to cry right now.  Maybe it’s the whiskey. Maybe it’s that he cried so hard in the fifteen minutes it took Ishida to arrive that he has used up all his tears for the night. Or maybe it’s just the calming presence of the other body in the room, long-limbed and solid. Some other heartbeat, signaling that he’s not alone, that he’s human and alive and he is not alone.

“I think I’m okay now, Doc.”

“Hmm.”

They sit in silence, as the environmental controls of the apartment kick in and hum. As neon lights flicker outside, casting cheap aurora borealis across the blank walls. As Kaidan sips the whiskey, as he breathes.

“You know anything about quantum mechanics, Doc?”

“A bit. Pop science stuff.” Ishida looks at him curiously.

“You know anything about Schrödinger’s cat?”

“The one where the cat’s both alive and dead, something like that?”

“Yeah. The theory that says, matter exists, but only when it’s being observed. And until the moment it’s being observed, it exists in this, uh, this in-between state, like a hanging question mark— it hasn’t decided what it’s gonna be. And only when something observes it… it’s only then that the thing becomes itself, it becomes one thing, instead of the other thing it could have been.” At Ishida’s puzzled look, he says, “Okay, maybe I’m not explaining it very well.”

“No, I’m familiar with the concept. I’m just curious where you’re going with this.”

“It’s the messages, Doc.”

Ishida tilts his head, and narrows his eyes as he gets it.

“As long as you don’t look at the messages, there’s a possibility that what happened, didn’t happen?”

Kaidan nods. “I don’t know what I’m going to hear, when I press play. It’s waiting there, like a— like a dead cat left in a box too long. I can _guess_ what mess is waiting, but I don’t _know_ — as long as I don’t open them… maybe the cat’s alive, you know? That possibility still exists. I haven’t ruined it by looking. The cat may be alive, and all this might just be a really bad dream. I’m really scared of seeing the dead cat.” He thinks he must sound crazy. He knows his metaphors are clumsy.

The panic’s rising again, as he talks. His heart is the steady hammering of an assault rifle with an endless thermal clip. His breathing _hurts_.

“Kaidan.” Ishida puts a hand on the back of Kaidan’s neck.

_Just breathe_ , two voices say at once, past and present.

A cat in a box. A body lost in space.

A warm hand on the back of his neck, anchoring him in place, the way her body isn’t.

His eyes are squeezed shut, and Ishida’s palm is cool against his hot skin, and he’s rocking again, fist held to his mouth, and it _hurts_. He is snotting into his fist, and he is sweating, he feels so _hot_ , but not in a good way, but in the way a fever is hot, as it burns its way through the body’s veins, as it hurts the thing it’s trying to heal.

Time drifts forward. His heart slows. Ishida is sitting next to him, and they are both sitting in the dark, because Arcturus’s artificial lights have dimmed, and Kaidan hasn’t turned on the lights. His sweat has cooled, and now he is cold, and covered in snot, and Ishida’s hand is still on his neck, even as he hands Kaidan more tissues with the other.

Softly, Ishida begins to speak. “There is no dead cat. There are no possibilities, or question marks. Only periods. The worst has already happened.”

Kaidan keeps his eyes shut, brows furrowed painfully. He doesn’t want to look. If he looks, he’s afraid he’ll never be able to look away. That the truth in Ishida’s words will be all he ever sees, from the moment he opens his eyes again. His life will be forever divided into _before_  and _after._

“There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, because it has already happened,” Ishida says, a voice in the dark, a hand on his neck. “Whether you check your messages or not—it is what it is.”

Kaidan listens.

_It is what it is_. Even in the breaths between dreaming and waking. Even when he’s not looking, it’s still there. Even without her body, or a lock of hair to fold into the pages of a book, or a last chance to press his lips to the inside of her cold wrist, to hold her palm to his cheek, to his chest: it is what it is. The worst has already happened. What has never happened, will never happen, even if he can’t remember it, even if he never opens his eyes again.

He wishes he could unzip his own skin, shed it like a jumpsuit, and drift away— a pinprick of dark against the bright Milky Way.

But he can’t. It is what it is.  And Shepard’s dead even if he doesn’t check his messages; their content won’t change through his refusal to look, despite his desperate wishing.

“The worst has already happened,” he tries to say without falling apart.

Ishida waits until the shaking slows and stops. Until the growing pile of wet tissues has begun to tumble off the side of the coffee table onto the floor. He waits until Kaidan’s breathing is slow and steady, his too-skinny body slumped on the couch. He looks around for a blanket, finally finds one on the bed, and lays it over his patient’s sleeping form. He lets himself out, and the door whispers shut behind him. He looks at the time on his omni-tool. He thinks it is either much too late, or much too early.


	10. After Alchera, Kaidan checks his messages

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan finally checks his messages, effectively killing the cat

Where was he, when it happened?

Where _was_ he?

Why wasn’t he looking?

What had he missed?

Maybe there was some transmission he could have caught— some message intercepted, a forewarning, before possibility crystallized into certainty, before the cat inhaled the poison—

In the vids, there is always a moment of impending doom, like a starship skirting the undetected event horizon of a black hole, and the audience can see it coming, watching in agony as it draws closer, but the protagonist can’t. And the audience leans forward and collectively urges, _“Look, we see it, turn your head and look, there’s still time, you can salvage this, look—”_

And then the hero, or the hero’s sidekick, partner, friend, at the last moment of possibility, turns their head and looks, and disaster is averted, the trap is unset, the black hole escaped, the hero _alive_.

When was that moment for Kaidan?  Was he mindlessly tinkering with some stupid piece of electronics on the Normandy’s lower deck, when a crucial message was sent? When whoever attacked was sending coordinates of the Normandy’s location? Was he asleep, drooling onto Shepard’s shoulder, as the enemy flickered into view at the nearest mass relay? Was he bickering with Tali about the pros and cons of the latest model of omni-tool, or about which galactic prince their latest drama star should choose? When if he had just looked out the window, he could have seen the silent mass of destruction bearing down on them, readying its cannons.

Where the hell _was_ he, right before the point of no return had been passed, when what _could_ happen, became what _did_ happen, before any of them had a clue?

Where the hell was he?

The guilt seeps like a sore that just won’t heal. He sits with his head in his hands and does what his doctor has told him to do: _just feel it. There’s no use fighting it. Feel it, and when it lessens, do something productive. Do acts of atonement, if you feel that’s necessary._

How is he ever going to atone for all the things he missed, every clue the audience would have been screaming at him to see, while he was taking a piss or browsing the Extranet for asari fetish sites to scandalize Garrus with?

There is no making up for such reckless carelessness. For such arrogant cluelessness. How do you atone for missing the crucial warning, for not hearing the message, for blindly focusing on all the stupid things that didn’t matter, had never mattered, while oblivion was bearing down on everything that mattered most? He can’t get his mind around it. He can’t see it or untangle it. It’s an equation he can’t solve. He can’t make up for the absence of Shepard’s figure taking point, fist raised, head cocked, alert and burning hotter than a flamethrower, or the shadow cast by her body spinning in space over those who watched her fall. He can’t replace her. He can’t rebuild her. No one can.

He finally checks his messages. He doesn’t even plan it, like he tried to last time. He just flicks his omni-tool and feels his guts twist and presses the blinking light and there they are, just as he feared. Message, after message, after message.

He has known it was coming. He has known it for awhile, intellectually. The news vids had finally dropped the story about the search for Shepard’s body, when days became weeks, and weeks became months, and no sign of it had been spotted. The Alliance had been searching, promising to do their best to bring Shepard’s corpse back, if there was one to bring back, to bring closure for the Hero of the Citadel, to enshrine her somewhere befitting a brave soldier who had given her life to protect the galaxy from the Geth, from a rogue Spectre helming a unique alien ship.

But as time kept flowing forward, despite Kaidan’s wishes to reverse it,  the news reports became sparse, until one day he could walk by every vidscreen on Arcturus and not hear a whisper of her name.

So he didn’t know the exact moment they finally called off the search, and shifted her status from “missing in action” to “killed in action.” He has suspected it was coming, or had already happened. But he hadn’t _known_ , until now, as he finally opens his messages and sees the navy-wide memo tersely stating that Alliance resources could no longer be spared to continue the search, and as no wreckage or body had thus far been recovered, it was likely lost, incinerated in the blast that rocked the escape pods as the Normandy consumed itself.

MIA. KIA.

Letters on a blank field. A cipher shifting positions in the alphabet to reveal the truth. From possible, unofficial, hopeful- to certainty, official, _it is what it is._

KIA.

He stares at the letters on the screen. He feels nothing. He begins reading. Messages from former classmates, from acquaintances back on Earth, who had heard the news from his mom that _yes, her son had been on the Normandy, but he’s okay, thank goodness he’s okay_ , and were just sending “glad you’re still alive, buddy” messages. He sees messages from Tali, Wrex, Garrus. Chakwas. Most of them have already left Arcturus. They’ve been gone for months. He can’t bear to think about the last time he saw them right now. He skips them. There are no messages from Joker.

He sees one from Liara. _URGENT_.

He opens it.

_Kaidan,_

_I need your address, wherever you’re staying for the foreseeable future. There’s something I need to send you._

_Liara_

He has no idea where in the galaxy she is now. Or the others. He can’t bear to ask. He can’t talk about it yet. He can’t carry their pain, the tremor in their voices, the heavy silence, their shuddering breath. He can’t even carry his own. He can’t reminisce, or exert the effort to make himself say the appropriate things, the empty words you’re supposed to say to stupid questions like “How are you holding up?” But he can grant her this simple request. He replies to her message, with just his address.

He takes a deep breath.

He sees another message from the navy. They’re having a memorial. He is invited. It will take place in a few weeks. He closes his eyes. He tries to imagine standing in a crowd of people, like at Jenkins’s funeral, watching two green rookies fumble with a flag. He tries to imagine all the official people standing around, all the people who never really knew her, bowing their heads and mouthing the words _hero_ and bullshit about _being at peace_ , as if she could be summed up in one word, as if _being at peace_ somehow makes up for _being dead,_ as if peace is a word Shepard even _knew_ , let alone wanted, when she couldn’t hardly bear to stand still to _literally_ save her life, and Kaidan wants to put his fist through someone’s skull.

He opens his eyes. He flicks past more messages, condolences, relief, questions, interview opportunities, bank statements, the evidence of life that keeps going on its own accord, without him having to do a thing, effortlessly as breathing used to be, piling up while he had been running, outside of himself. He sees a message from a name he doesn’t recognize, but is flagged as personal and urgent. He opens it.

_Lt. Kaidan Alenko,_

_Please allow me to offer my condolences during this difficult time._

_It is my duty to inform you as executor of E. A. S. Shepard’s estate that you have been named as her sole beneficiary in her last will and testament. As Cdr. Shepard has officially been declared deceased, and a death certificate has been issued, I am now at liberty to begin distributing her assets, and kindly request that you come to my office on Arcturus Station at your earliest convenience._

_Kind Regards,_

_Freya Gomez III, Esquire_

Kaidan blinks. He stupidly wonderswhat _A. S._ stands for.He hadn’t even known she had a middle name, let alone two. She had assets? Enough assets that she felt the need to have a will? She named _him_ as her beneficiary? When the hell had she done that? She had never even said the words _I love you._  

It does not surprise him, how she manages to surprise him, even while dead.

He wonders where he was.

He wonders about all he missed, while he wasn’t looking.

He wonders why the hell he wasn’t looking.

He wonders about all the things he’ll never have a chance to know, as the audience screams at him to _look, look, before it’s too late, everything can be okay if you’d just LOOK._

But that’s all wrong.

Because the event horizon has already been crossed. _It is what it is_. And it’s just him, alone, staring blindly into the black. 


	11. After Alchera, Herons and Hamsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaidan cries again

Here is a sliver of time, snicked from the shockingly small amount they had been given, that he could never shake the feeling that he hadn’t hoarded properly, that he had wasted, seconds spilling over the edges as he carelessly assumed seconds would turn into minutes into hours into months into years into the rest of their lives, as if time were a rifle with an endless clip—

Watching a vid, blue light flickering across the white walls, under a blanket even though they were both sweating, slick skin sticky where they pressed into each other. The sharp planes of her shoulder were hard under his cheek, but she absently ran her fingers through his hair and he didn’t want to move in case she came back to herself and stopped. The hamster, toted around with Shepard anytime she knew she’d be on shore leave, huddled in its wheel, framed by the window.

The marines on the screen encountered the enemy on foot and one performed a particularly graceful move that broke her opponent’s neck, the snap vivid through the speakers. Shepard made a happy, satisfied sound.

They had worked out a deal: for every action vid Shepard wanted to watch, they watched one of Kaidan’s soap operas. He never understood why someone whose job it was to kill would want to watch actors pretend to do it in their downtime.

“It’s soothing to see the fake,” she had said.

“The fake?”

“Yeah, when they do something impossible, that would never actually work in life, but the music is swelling and everyone is good looking and the good guys win.”

“So good guys winning is fake?”

“Oh yeah.”

“We’re the good guys, Shepard,” he had said, and she had looked at him with that expression he could never read.

“ _You’re_ a good guy,” she had finally said, curling her palm around the back of his neck.

“So I’m not gonna win, huh?”

“S’why I’m here. To make sure you do anyway.”

He had stared at her, but she had just turned back to watching, making pleased noises every time the bullets found their mark.

He had worried that she would be bored watching his soaps, but she seemed to take as much satisfaction from watching the characters break each other with words as she did when they used weapons.

“That was fucking clever,” she had said, after a particularly well-played villain machination that ended with the love interest turning their back on their true love.

“I thought you liked seeing the good guys win?” he had asked.

“Yeah but it’s a soap, right? There will be a happily-ever-after, but it doesn’t mean shit unless our couple goes through some shit.”

He had snorted, and the music had swelled.

Now, in this remembered sliver of time, she suddenly jerked, as if she had seen something in her periphery (even when she was resting, she was watching), and she sat up, neck stretching as her eyes searched for the movement. He made a little sound, a hitched breath of complaint, and he reached for her but she said, “Look,” and he looked.

A heron sat perched on the balcony railing on the other side of the window.

They watched in silence, the vid paused, as the large bird tilted its head, as its wings shifted, as the moon’s reflection from the water dappled across its hunched form.

“I’ve never seen one in real life,” she whispered.

“There are a lot around here. The orchard is in the middle of a wild bird refuge,” he murmured back.

“That fucker is majestic.”

“You think that until you hear it squawk. Their calls are not exactly pretty.”

“Don’t ruin the illusion, Alenko.”

The hamster in the window must have finally seen the bird then, because it started running frantically, the clattering of the wheel spinning shattering the silence. The heron lifted, flapped, and sailed out into the dark.

“Good job, Captain Ham. If that had been a frag grenade, you’d be dead,” she informed the hamster.

“At least you get to keep your illusions for a while longer,” he said.

She reached out and picked up her beer bottle, offering him a swig. “Let’s drink to that.” She smiled, and pulled him down onto her shoulder again, rough fingers dragging through his wild hair as gunfire filled the room again.

Now, standing in her apartment on Arcturus, Kaidan wonders if the hamster’s frantic, futile running hadn’t been some kind of metaphor, as his heart thuds in the silence. In his mind he fingers that sliver of time, bracing for the inevitable cut as he traces the moment’s contours. He steps cautiously, as if the place is rigged with trip mines, but then jerks to a halt as he notices that the small space doesn’t smell like her— but why would it, when she hadn’t been in this apartment in months, in over a year maybe. The air filtration system had probably sucked all scent of her from the confined space and been pumping in neutral, recycled oxygen through all those seconds minutes hours days he had spent with her across the galaxy.

He had gone to her attorney, and he had learned that she had left him everything, somewhere between their gunfights and careening across distant planets, Wrex blowing chunks in the back of the Mako, between their frenzied fucking in the downtimes and their laughter in the canteen as Ash and Garrus arm-wrestled and Tali recorded for posterity and credits changed hands as bets were won and lost. Somewhere in between she had written a will and he knows now that her betting wasn’t just for laughs— when she scored at the casinos, she’d set aside sums for investment, and she had a fat pile of financial assets that she had never touched because she was busy saving the galaxy instead of spending credits.

He stands now, in her private space that doesn’t smell like her, hands loose at his sides, wondering about all the things he’ll never know about her. He knew that she had grown up poor on Mindoir. Maybe that’s why she had been so careful with all of her careless winnings— that reckless compulsion to win, tempered with the fear-propelled need to save the results.

He shakes his head. He doesn’t know why he has come here. He has no plans to empty the apartment, and he has no plans to live in it. The attorney had given him the access codes per Shep’s will, and he had avoided even thinking about them. But today he woke up and found himself standing in front of the door, his arm lifted so that his omni-tool could do its thing. He had stopped, chest shuddering as terror began to garrote him. People swept past, going about their normal unfucked lives, and he struggled to look normal while his throat choked itself. He called Ishida.

“Kaidan.” His shrink squinted at him through the vidscreen.

“Hiya.”

“You look like shit, what happened?” He tilted his head, and Kaidan knew he was looking at what was behind him, his clever mind ticking through possibilities.

“I’m at Shep’s apartment.”

Ishida just waited.

“I’m scared,” Kaidan cleared his throat.

“Of what?”

“Dunno.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Yeah.” Kaidan rubbed the back of his neck. He watched Ishida watching him, and felt the terror slowly bleed out of him. After a few minutes, he could think straight. “I guess I was afraid of how much it’s going to hurt to step inside there and see all of her things, and,” he paused, breathed. He made a little flailing gesture, but of course Ishida couldn’t see it— the movement  just waved the vidscreen around. He continued. “See all these bits of her that I never knew about while she was alive. See her things when she hadn’t prepared for me to see them, you know? Like I’m trespassing, or something.”

“But it’s not her apartment anymore. It’s yours,” Ishida said.

“Yeah, but—”

“She must have wanted you to see what was in there. She wouldn’t have left it to you if she hadn’t.”

Kaidan didn’t respond. He thought about Shepard saying that she was always prepared to— he blinked. That she was always prepared to die. At any moment. That it was just her job.

“Okay.”

“Do you want me to meet you there? I know your ass is all alone out here, so if you need someone to be with you, I can take the time out of my exceedingly busy schedule to hold your hand,” Ishida said evenly. Kaidan snorted. Somehow he had gotten used to how his therapist said the rudest things in the most genteel tone of voice.

“No. It’s fine.” He took a deep breath. “I can do this. Thanks, Doc.”

“I know you can,” Ishida said, and then promptly disconnected.

Kaidan squared his shoulders, and entered the apartment.

Now, he shakes his head again. He inhales deeply, but it just smells like Arcturus always smells. He is surprised to see the place is filled with _plants_. Vines and ferns and cacti and some little bushes with delicate little flowers blooming. She must have some sort of automatic hydration system, because he knows no one has been in here since before her death. He had no idea she had any interest in botany. He drifts further into the apartment, notices how the plants are pretty much the only decoration so far. No art. No personal knick knacks. Just a riot of green, and dishes strewn across the kitchen counter. The lack of _Shepardness_ after all that fear of falling apart in her personal space is almost like a punch to his solar plexus. He sags and moves towards the bedroom.

As he turns, he spots a pile of clothing stacked sloppily in the corner. He blinks, then almost breaks his knee against the coffee table in his frantic scramble to reach it.

“Fuck,” he chokes, hopping a little as he grabs the first garment his hands touch and shoves his face in it.

He gasps and hears himself laughing, shrilly. The hoodie stinks. Like cigarettes . He pauses. Sniffs again. Like cigarettes and… tequila? But also, underneath, like _her_. She never smelled like flowers, or fruit. She just smelled like _her_. Skin and sweat and gun oil and coffee. He is laughing because of course her dirty clothes reek of some shitty bar and of course they’re piled in the corner and thank the universe or the Goddess or whoever else that she was such a reckless slob sometimes because now he is pulling the hoodie over his head and it is stretching painfully across his broad shoulders but he’s surrounded by Shepard’s smell and he can almost _feel_ her lying beside him on the floor, hungover as hell, both their mouths dry and horrible with morning breath, and her laughing in his face anyway, throwing an arm around his waist and saying, “Fuck it’s too early.”

“Really, if you think about it, time as we measure it planetside has no meaning in space,” he would say. “No early, no late.”

“Bullshit. It’s too fucking early for you to be philosophical. I have a headache that makes me sympathize with your biotic ass headaches and I don’t like _sympathizing_ ,” she groaned.

“Uh, the proper term is _migraines_ , and no matter how crazy you’ve partied in the past, you have _no idea_ how bad they are,” he placed his index finger on her nose and tapped. “No. Idea.”

“Not. Helping,” she bit out, tapping his belly with her knuckles before sloppily kissing him.

Now, he knows he would probably look unhinged if anyone were watching, but he drags the rest of the clothing back into the living area and spreads the pieces around himself. He bunches up a pair of her cargo pants and lays his head on them, curls in on himself right there on floor, arms around his knees, and he breathes, and breathes, and breathes.

He slips into sleep.

He dreams he is watching a flock of herons in space from the Normandy’s deck, wings eclipsing swathes of stars. He is confused because he has never seen herons fly together; they are always alone, perched gracefully at the edge of the water, their grating calls wrecking the peaceful view. Shepard is there, but for some reason her hair is shorn, her neck exposed, and he wants to run his fingers up the soft down on the back of her head—he reaches to fist his hand in the longer tufts on top and pull her back to kiss her, but she twists away and begins to unbolt the window, one bolt at a time, each chunk of metal hitting the deck like seconds ticking on an antique clock. He realizes she’s going to detach the window and dive in amongst the birds out there in the vacuum, and there is nothing he can do to stop her but he doesn’t know why. All he can hear is a hamster wheel spinning and the bolts striking the floor, one after another.

He jerks awake, and his back hurts, because he is on the floor. He is crying again, arms and legs flung out, his shoulders aching from the stretch and reminding him how hunched over he has held his body for _months_. He clutches at the sweatshirt and yanks it up to his nose and inhales, and the reasons behind the bar stench soaking the fabric make him cry harder, because he wonders now, even if she hadn’t died over Alchera, maybe he would have lost her in another way— to red sand, to the bottom of a glass, to her own twitchy fingers and filthy mouth and fragile neck and reckless disregard for her own safety. He can’t believe himself, how many seconds minutes hours days months he wasted believing that the time they had was an infinity clip, that he had all the time in the universe to learn all the things he didn’t know about her, instead of exploiting each ticking moment like the digits counting down on a time bomb. He hates every nanosecond he spent not looking, not asking, not demanding, not licking, not inhaling. The regret is crushing the meat of his heart, the self-loathing drenching him like an oil spill. His shrink said to just feel it. So he feels it. He keeps the hoodie’s neckline pulled up over his nose, like an oxygen mask, as his breaths come hard and ragged, and he lets his body throb with the _missing_ of Shepard.

Eventually, in time, the time he burns through so carelessly, he stops crying—the inside of the sweatshirt is slick with his snot and tears. He sits up. He gathers the clothes he had spread all around himself and takes them to the little washing unit and puts them inside and hits the button before he can change his mind. He keeps the damp and now truly disgusting hoodie on as he turns to face the empty apartment, to begin sifting through the layers of Shepard’s life, a clumsy archeologist amidst the ruins of her abandoned things.


End file.
